Wherefore art thou r3579x?: anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography

In a social network, nodes correspond to people or other social entities, and edges correspond to social links between them. In an effort to preserve privacy, the practice of anonymization replaces names with meaningless unique identifiers. We describe a family of attacks such that even from a single anonymized copy of a social network, it is possible for an adversary to learn whether edges exist or not between specific targeted pairs of nodes. Categories and Subject Descriptors F.2.2 [Analysis of Algorithms and Problem Complexity]: Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems General Terms Theory, Measurement Keywords social networks, anonymization, privacy in data mining

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Lars Backstrom, Cynthia Dwork, Jon M. Kleinberg
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Keywords Social Networks, Meaningless Unique Identifiers, Social Network, WWW 2007