Differentially Private Web Browsing Trajectory over Infinite Streams

Abstract

Nowadays, a lot of data mining applications, such as web traffic analysis and content popularity prediction, leverage users’ web browsing trajectories to improve their performance. However, the disclosure of web browsing trajectory is the most prominent issue. A novel privacy model, named Differential Privacy, is used to rigorously protect user’s privacy. Some works have applied this privacy model to spatial-temporal streams. However, these works either protect the users’ activities in different places separately or protect their activities in all places jointly. The former one cannot protect trajectories that traverse multiple places; while the latter ignores the differences among places and suffers the degradation of data utility (i.e., data accuracy). In this paper, we propose a $\left(w,n\right)$ -differential privacy to protect any spatial-temporal sequence occurring in $w$ successive timestamps and $n$ -range places. To achieve better data utility, we propose two implementation algorithms, named Spatial-Temporal Budget Distribution (STBD) and Spatial-Temporal RescueDP (STR). Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that these two algorithms can achieve a balance between data utility and trajectory privacy guarantee.