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IBM researches Web privacy techniques
Tuesday, June 04 2002
by Matthew Clark


To protect privacy, IBM researchers are looking into ways that let users lie on
Internet questionnaires without affecting the accuracy of the overall survey.

On-line merchants and retailers routinely ask users personal questions, such as
age, income or marital status, in order to better gauge who their customers are
for marketing purposes. The trouble with these surveys, according to IBM, is that
users routinely lie due to concerns over privacy. 



To overcome this, Dr. Rakesh Agrawal and Dr. Ramakrishnan Srikant, researchers at
IBM's Almaden Research Center, have developed a system called Privacy-Preserving
Data Mining, which relies on the notion that one's personal data can be protected
by being scrambled or randomised prior to being communicated to Web sites. "Our
research institutionalises the notion of fibbing on the Internet and does so to
preserve the overall reality behind the data," said Dr. Agrawal.



IBM claims that by applying this technique, a retailer can generate highly
accurate data models without ever seeing personal information. 



For example, a survey could ask users to input their income between a range of
EUR50,000 and EUR150,000 per year. But before that information is transmitted to
the Web merchant, IBM's software would add or subtract a randomisation parameter
of -EUR30,000 to +EUR30,000. The merchant sets this randomisation parameter. 



Subsequently one user who earns EUR100,000 could transmit a figure of EUR85,000,
while another could report the amount as EUR105,000, even though they both earn
the same amount in reality. No record is kept of either user's true salary. On a
per-user basis, the survey results are useless because the data is often
inaccurate. But when enough users are surveyed, IBM's software can apply
algorithms to compensate for the data scrambling. 



"The beauty of this research is that retailers and other Web businesses are
able to extract the valuable demographic information they need without
necessarily knowing the underlying personal consumer data," said Harriet P.
Pearson, IBM's chief privacy officer. 



And the new technology comes as retailers are facing increasing pressure to stop
collecting information on users. According a March 2002 survey from the Progress
and Freedom Foundation think tank, commercial Internet sites are collecting less
information on visitors. 



That survey said that among the 100 most popular domains in the US, the
proportion collecting personal information fell from 96 percent in May 2000 to 84
percent in December 2001. The proportion of domains using third-party cookies has
also declined from 78 percent in May 2000 to 48 percent by the end of last year.



According to Dr. Agrawal, the Privacy-Preserving Data Mining research has a wide
range of potential applications, from medical research and building disease
prediction models using randomised individual medical histories to e-commerce and
accurate promotions using randomised demographics of individual users.