Profiling social networks to provide useful and privacy‐preserving web search
Alexandre Viejo, David Sánchez · Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2014
Web search engines (WSEs) use search queries to profile users and to provide personalized services like query disambiguation or refinement. These services are valuable because users get an enhanced search experience. However, the compiled user profiles may contain sensitive information that might represent a privacy threat. This issue should be addressed in a way that it also preserves the utility of the profile with regard to search services. State‐of‐the‐art approaches tackle these issues by generating and submitting fake queries that are related to the interests of the user. This technique allows the WSE to only know general (and useful) data while the detailed (and potentially private) data are obfuscated. To build fake queries, these proposals rely on past queries to obtain user interests. However, we argue that this is not always the best strategy and, in this article, we study the use of social networks to gather more accurate user profiles that enable better personalized service while offering a similar, or even better, level of practical privacy. These hypotheses are empirically supported by evaluations using real profiles gathered from Twitter and a set of AOL search queries.