Anonymization for multiple released social network graphs

Abstract

Recently, people share their information via social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in their daily life. Social networks on the Internet can be regarded as a microcosm of the real world and worth being analyzed. Since the data in social networks can be private and sensitive, privacy preservation in social networks has been a focused study. Previous works develop anonymization methods for a single social network represented by a single graph, which are not enough for the analysis on the evolution of the social network. In this paper, we study the privacy preserving problem considering the evolution of a social network. A time-series of social network graphs representing the evolution of the corresponding social network are anonymized to a sequence of sanitized graphs to be released for further analysis. We point out that naively applying the existing approaches to each time-series graph will break the privacy purposes, and propose an effective anonymization method extended from an existing approach, which takes into account the effect of time for releasing multiple anonymized graphs at one time. We use two real datasets to test our method and the experiment results demonstrate that our method is very effective in terms of data utility for query answering. © Springer-Verlag 2013.