Research Article

Implicit privacy preservation: a framework based on data generation

¹ Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing (Tongji University), Ministry of Education, Shanghai, 201804, China
² National (Province-Ministry Joint) Collaborative Innovation Center for Financial Network Security, Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China

^* Corresponding author (email: cjjiang@tongji.edu.cn)

Received: 5 March 2022
Revised: 6 June 2022
Accepted: 16 June 2022

Abstract

This paper addresses a special and imperceptible class of privacy, called implicit privacy. In contrast to traditional (explicit) privacy, implicit privacy has two essential properties: (1) It is not initially defined as a privacy attribute; (2) it is strongly associated with privacy attributes. In other words, attackers could utilize it to infer privacy attributes with a certain probability, indirectly resulting in the disclosure of private information. To deal with the implicit privacy disclosure problem, we give a measurable definition of implicit privacy, and propose an ex-ante implicit privacy-preserving framework based on data generation, called IMPOSTER. The framework consists of an implicit privacy detection module and an implicit privacy protection module. The former uses normalized mutual information to detect implicit privacy attributes that are strongly related to traditional privacy attributes. Based on the idea of data generation, the latter equips the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework with an additional discriminator, which is used to eliminate the association between traditional privacy attributes and implicit ones. We elaborate a theoretical analysis for the convergence of the framework. Experiments demonstrate that with the learned generator, IMPOSTER can alleviate the disclosure of implicit privacy while maintaining good data utility.