Anonymizing popularity in online social networks with full utility

With the rapid growth of social network applications, more and more people are participating in social networks. Privacy protection in online social networks becomes an important issue. The illegal disclosure or improper use of users’ private information will lead to unaccepted or unexpected consequences in people’s lives. In this paper, we concern on authentic popularity disclosure in online social networks. To protect users’ privacy, the social networks need to be anonymized. However, existing anonymization algorithms on social networks may lead to nontrivial utility loss. The reason is that the anonymization process has changed the social network’s structure. The social network’s utility, such as retrieving data files, reading data files, and sharing data files among different users, has decreased. Therefore, it is a challenge to develop an effective anonymization algorithm to protect the privacy of user’s authentic popularity in online social networks without decreasing their utility. In this paper, we first design a hierarchical authorization and capability delegation (HACD) model. Based on this model, we propose a novel utility-based popularity anonymization (UPA) scheme, which integrates proxy re-encryption with keyword search techniques, to tackle this issue. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme can not only protect the users’ authentic popularity privacy, but also keep the full utility of the social network. Extensive experiments on large real-world online social networks confirm the efficacy and efficiency of our scheme.