Toward Correlated Data Trading for Private Web Browsing History

The trading of social media data has attracted wide research interests over years. In particular, the trading for Web browsing histories, when being applied to targeted advertising, produces tremendous economic value for data consumers. However, the disclosure of entire browsing histories, even in form of anonymous data sets, poses a huge threat to user privacy. Although some existing solutions have investigated privacy-preserving outsourcing of social media data, unfortunately, they neglected the impact on the data consumer’s utility. In this article, we propose CEATSE, a correlated data trading framework for various kinds of private Web browsing histories. CEATSE first models the correlation among multiple dimensional features, and then generates the optimal feature clustering scheme. Combined with this scheme, CEATSE next incorporates a correlated data perturbation strategy on each feature cluster, in order to balance the privacy-utility tradeoff. It then quantifies each chosen data contributor’s privacy loss on optimal feature clusters. Through real-data-based experiments, our analysis and evaluation results demonstrate CEATSE indeed achieves user privacy protection, the data consumer’s accuracy requirement, and truthfulness, individual rationality as well as budget balance.