Enforcing k-anonymity in Web Mail Auditing

We study the problem of k-anonymization of mail messages in the realistic scenario of auditing mail traffic in a major commercial Web mail service. Mail auditing is necessary in various Web mail debugging and quality assurance activities, such as anti-spam or the qualitative evaluation of novel mail features. It is conducted by trained professionals, often referred to as “auditors”, who are shown messages that could expose personally identifiable information. We address here the challenge of k-anonymizing such messages, focusing on machine generated mail messages that represent more than 90% of today’s mail traffic. We introduce a novel message signature Mail-Hash, specifically tailored to identifying structurally-similar messages, which allows us to put such messages in a same equivalence class. We then define a process that generates, for each class, masked mail samples that can be shown to auditors, while guaranteeing the k-anonymity of users. The productivity of auditors ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: WSDM
• Authors: Dotan Di Castro, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Yoelle Maarek, Ran Wolff, Eyal Zohar
• Keywords: Data Mining, WSDM 2016