Workshop on Design Issues for a data Anonymization Competition (WODIAC)

https://petsymposium.org/2017/workshop.php

The analysis of large scale datasets, often refer to as Big Data, offers the possibility to realize inferences with an unprecedented level of accuracy and details. However, this massive collection of information also raises many privacy issues since most of these datasets contain personal information, which is thus sensitive by nature. As a result, only very few of them are released and available, which limits both our ability to analyze such data to derive useful knowledge that could benefit to the public and the society at large and slows down the innovative services that could emerge from such data. Thus, an important scientific and societal challenge is the design and study anonymization mechanisms that can be used to remove the sensitive information or add uncertainty to a dataset before it is released or before further services are developed on it.

To address this issue, we will organize a data anonymization competition, to be held in conjunction with PETS 2018, to study the strengths and limits of anonymization methods from an empirical perspective. The main objective of this workshop is to investigate the design issues related to the organization of such a competition:

• First, the choice of the privacy model, the privacy metrics as well as the adversary model used are fundamental issues that need to be well thought out to be sure that they really correspond to realistic and grounded measures of privacy.
• Second, it is also necessary to define the main inference attacks that could be performed by the adversary based on the released data but also on his background knowledge.
• Third, the utility measures need also be chosen to meaningfully assess the achievable trade-off between utility and privacy.
• Fourth, the logistical issues surrounding the competition such as data sources, setting, rules, format and timeline.

The expected outcome of the workshop is a set of recommendations and guidelines to establish the competition.

Organizers :

Sébastien Gambs, UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), Canada, <gambs DOT sebastien AT uqam ca>
Hiroaki Kikuchi, Meiji University, Japan, <kikn AT meiji ac jp>

This content has been updated on 31 July 2017 at 16 h 57 min.