Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing
Creators: name: Iftikhar, Masooma
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2022

description: With the advances of data analytics, preserving privacy in publishing data about individuals becomes an important task. The data publishing process includes two phases: (i) data collection phase, and (ii) data publishing phase. In the data collection phase companies, organizations, and government agencies collect data from individuals through different means (such as surveys, polls, and questionnaires). Subsequently, in the data publishing phase, the data publisher or data holder publishes the collected data and information for analysis and research purposes which are later used to inform policy decision making. Given the private nature of collected data about individuals, releasing such data may raise privacy concerns, and there has been much interest to devise privacy-preserving mechanisms for data analysis. Moreover, preserving privacy of an individual while enhancing utility of published data is one of the most challenging problems in data privacy, requiring well-designed privacy-preserving mechanisms for data publishing. In recent years, differential privacy has emerged as one formal notion of privacy. To publish data under the guarantees of differential privacy, there is a need for preserving data utility, along with data privacy. However, the utility of published data under differential privacy is often limited, due to the amount of noise needed to achieve differential privacy. One of the key challenges in differentially private data publishing mechanisms is to simultaneously preserve data privacy while enhancing data utility. This thesis undertakes this challenge and introduces novel privacy-preserving mechanisms under the privacy guarantee of differential privacy to publish individuals' data while enhancing published data utility for different data structures. In this thesis, I explore both relational data publishing and graph data publishing. The first part of this thesis will consider the problem of generating differentially private datasets by integrating microaggregation into the relational data publishing methods in order to enhance published data utility. The second part of this thesis will consider graph data publishing. When applying differential privacy to network data, two interpretations of differential privacy exist: \emph{edge differential privacy} (edge-DP) and \emph{node differential privacy} (node-DP). Under edge-DP, I propose a microaggregation-based framework for graph anonymization which preserves the topological structures of an original graph at different levels of granularity through adding controlled perturbation to its edges. Under node-DP, I study the problem of publishing higher-order network statistics. Furthermore, I consider personalization to achieve personal data protection under personalized (edge or node) differential privacy while enhancing network data utility. To this extent, four approaches are proposed to handle the personal privacy requirements of individuals. I have conducted extensive experiments using real-world datasets to verify the utility enhancement and privacy guarantee of the proposed frameworks against existing state-of-the-art methods to publish relational and graph data.