Online services such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing highquality experiences to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by personalizing services based on special knowledge about users. For example, a user’s location, demographics, and search and browsing history may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information in return for enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can identify a near-optimal solution to the utilityprivacy tradeoff. We evaluate the methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess users ’ preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoples ’ willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using only a small amount of information about users.

Dealing with sensitive data has been the focus of much of recent research. On one hand data disclosure may incur some risk due to security breaches, but on the other hand data sharing has many advantages. For example, revealing customer transactions at a grocery store may be beneficial when studying purchasing patterns and market demand. However, a potential misuse of the revealed information may be harmful due to privacy violations. In this paper we study the tradeoff between data disclosure and data retention. Specifically, we address the problem of minimizing the risk of data disclosure while maintaining its utility above a certain acceptable threshold. We formulate the problem as a discrete optimization problem and leverage the special monotonicity characteristics for both risk and utility to construct an efficient algorithm to solve it. Such an algorithm determines the optimal transformations that need to be performed on the microdata before it gets released. These optimal transformations take into account both the risk associated with data disclosure and the benefit of it (referred to as utility). Through extensive experimental studies we compare the performance of our proposed algorithm with other date disclosure algorithms in the literature in terms of risk, utility, and time. We show that our proposed framework outperforms other techniques for sensitive data disclosure.

Dealing with sensitive data has been the focus of much of recent research. On one hand data disclosure may incur some risk due to security breaches, but on the other hand data sharing has many advantages. For example, revealing customer transactions at a grocery store may be beneficial when studying purchasing patterns and market demand. However, a potential misuse of the revealed information may be harmful due to privacy violations. In this paper we study the tradeoff between data disclosure and data retention. Specifically, we address the problem of minimizing the risk of data disclosure while maintaining its utility above a certain acceptable threshold. We formulate the problem as a discrete optimization problem and leverage the special monotonicity characteristics for both risk and utility to construct an efficient algorithm to solve it. Such an algorithm determines the optimal transformations that need to be performed on the microdata before it gets released. These optimal transformations take into account both the risk associated with data disclosure and the benefit of it (referred to as utility). Through extensive experimental studies we compare the performance of our proposed algorithm with other date disclosure algorithms in the literature in terms of risk, utility, and time. We show that our proposed framework outperforms other techniques for sensitive data disclosure.

Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user’s demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess users preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoples willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users. 1.