Using social networks to distort users' profiles generated by web search engines

  • Authors:

  • Alexandre Viejo;Jordi Castellí-Roca

  • Affiliations:

  • Departament d'Enginyeria Informítica i Matemítiques, UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans 26, E-43007 Tarragona, Spain and Institute of In ...;Departament d'Enginyeria Informítica i Matemítiques, UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans 26, E-43007 Tarragona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The Internet is one of the most important sources of knowledge in the present time. It offers a huge volume of information which grows dramatically every day. Web search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo...) are widely used to find specific data among that information. However, these useful tools also represent a privacy threat for the users: the web search engines profile them by storing and analyzing all the searches that they have previously submitted. To address this privacy threat, current solutions propose new mechanisms that introduce a high cost in terms of computation and communication. In this paper, we propose a new scheme designed to protect the privacy of the users from a web search engine that tries to profile them. Our system uses social networks to provide a distorted user profile to the web search engine. The proposed protocol submits standard queries to the web search engine; thus it does not require any change in the server side. In addition to that, this scheme does not require the server to collaborate with the users. Our protocol improves the existing solutions in terms of query delay. Besides, the distorted profiles still allow the users to get a proper service from the web search engines.