arXiv subjects

Mathias Humbert

Publications and source records attributed to Mathias Humbert.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Tagvisor: A Privacy Advisor for Sharing Hashtags

Hashtag has emerged as a widely used concept of popular culture and campaigns, but its implications on people's privacy have not been investigated so far. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of privacy issues induced by hashtags. We concentrate in particular on location, which is recognized as one of the key privacy concerns in the Internet era. By relying on a random forest model, we show that we can infer a user's precise location from hashtags with accuracy of 70\% to 76\%, depending on the city. To remedy this situation, we introduce a system called Tagvisor that systematically suggests alternative hashtags if the user-selected ones constitute a threat to location privacy. Tagvisor realizes this by means of three conceptually different obfuscation techniques and a semantics-based metric for measuring the consequent utility loss. Our findings show that obfuscating as little as two hashtags already provides a near-optimal trade-off between privacy and utility in our dataset. This in particular renders Tagvisor highly time-efficient, and thus, practical in real-world settings.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

walk2friends: Inferring Social Links from Mobility Profiles

The development of positioning technologies has resulted in an increasing amount of mobility data being available. While bringing a lot of convenience to people's life, such availability also raises serious concerns about privacy. In this paper, we concentrate on one of the most sensitive information that can be inferred from mobility data, namely social relationships. We propose a novel social relation inference attack that relies on an advanced feature learning technique to automatically summarize users' mobility features. Compared to existing approaches, our attack is able to predict any two individuals' social relation, and it does not require the adversary to have any prior knowledge on existing social relations. These advantages significantly increase the applicability of our attack and the scope of the privacy assessment. Extensive experiments conducted on a large dataset demonstrate that our inference attack is effective, and achieves between 13% to 20% improvement over the best state-of-the-art scheme. We propose three defense mechanisms -- hiding, replacement and generalization -- and evaluate their effectiveness for mitigating the social link privacy risks stemming from mobility data sharing. Our experimental results show that both hiding and replacement mechanisms outperform generalization. Moreover, hiding and replacement achieve a comparable trade-off between utility and privacy, the former preserving better utility and the latter providing better privacy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2016

FairTest: Discovering Unwarranted Associations in Data-Driven Applications

In a world where traditional notions of privacy are increasingly challenged by the myriad companies that collect and analyze our data, it is important that decision-making entities are held accountable for unfair treatments arising from irresponsible data usage. Unfortunately, a lack of appropriate methodologies and tools means that even identifying unfair or discriminatory effects can be a challenge in practice. We introduce the unwarranted associations (UA) framework, a principled methodology for the discovery of unfair, discriminatory, or offensive user treatment in data-driven applications. The UA framework unifies and rationalizes a number of prior attempts at formalizing algorithmic fairness. It uniquely combines multiple investigative primitives and fairness metrics with broad applicability, granular exploration of unfair treatment in user subgroups, and incorporation of natural notions of utility that may account for observed disparities. We instantiate the UA framework in FairTest, the first comprehensive tool that helps developers check data-driven applications for unfair user treatment. It enables scalable and statistically rigorous investigation of associations between application outcomes (such as prices or premiums) and sensitive user attributes (such as race or gender). Furthermore, FairTest provides debugging capabilities that let programmers rule out potential confounders for observed unfair effects. We report on use of FairTest to investigate and in some cases address disparate impact, offensive labeling, and uneven rates of algorithmic error in four data-driven applications. As examples, our results reveal subtle biases against older populations in the distribution of error in a predictive health application and offensive racial labeling in an image tagger.

cs.CY↗