Embellishing Text Search Queries To Protect User Privacy

13 years 3 months ago

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Users of text search engines are increasingly wary that their activities may disclose conﬁdential information about their business or personal proﬁles. It would be desirable for a search engine to perform document retrieval for users while protecting their intent. In this paper, we identify the privacy risks arising from semantically related search terms within a query, and from recurring highspeciﬁcity query terms in a search session. To counter the risks, we propose a solution for a similarity text retrieval system to offer anonymity and plausible deniability for the query terms, and hence the user intent, without degrading the system’s precision-recall performance. The solution comprises a mechanism that embellishes each user query with decoy terms that exhibit similar speciﬁcity spread as the genuine terms, but point to plausible alternative topics. We also provide an accompanying retrieval scheme that enables the search engine to compute the encrypted document relevance...

HweeHwa Pang, Xuhua Ding, Xiaokui Xiao

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