Rating
systems put privacy at risk
By
Ted Smalley Bowen,
Technology Research NewsThe Internet has given us new ways of carrying out activities as diverse as shopping and political agitation, and many of these new modes share a strong dependency on the medium’s shaky guarantees of privacy and anonymity. This uncertainty has led to a variation on the trap of guilt by association: the threat of exposure by indirect association
The chance you take when you use a Web recommender is typical of this new jeopardy, which researchers at three U.S. universities have quantified into basic equations of risk and benefit.
A Web recommender, or recommendation system, is a consumer rating system popular with online buyers of books, movies, and other items whose merits are a matter of taste.
A Web recommender may, for example, suggest to a person who has rated only books about baseball that he might also like a book about ballet. The recommender would have this information if another person had rated books on both topics. The recommendation system could unearth this connection using a nearest neighbor algorithm, which searches for the query point, or data point nearest the reference.
In this example, the recommendation system, while supplying a form of advice, has also showed the baseball fan a weak tie, which in social network theory is a connection between groups that don’t ordinarily interact. A malicious user could exploit this seemingly incidental piece of information, according to the researchers.
On the Web, weak ties can be combined with other information to trace individual users’ identities. Such tracing robs users of the option to act anonymously, and can be used to mine personal, financial, political and other information and affiliations.
Even though the risks are intuitively apparent, it's difficult to quantify the odds of weak tie exposure.
Toward that end, a group of computer scientists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Purdue University and the University of Minnesota has analyzed the risks of exposure by mapping the types of connections users make -- often unconsciously -- when participating in recommendation systems.
“Our main goal was to quantifiably assess the benefits and risks," said Naren Ramakrishnan, a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. Everybody talks of risks in terms of ‘don't disclose credit card’, ‘don't disclose age and address’. But we hope to identify more subtle forms of risk involving seemingly harmless information,” he said.
The researchers did this using graph-theoretic models, which show relationships and connections among entities in a way similar to family trees, highway maps and organization charts. By mapping exposure risk, the researchers quantified the risks and benefits of recommendation systems in general.
“In our case, we use a graph-theoretic model to represent the connections between people and the artifacts they rate,” Ramakrishnan said. Recommendation systems make connections between people based on their common recommendations. Such connections, or jumps, move beyond the common items to the people who rated them.
These jumps can be represented as social network graphs, which depict people and how they are related. Recommender graphs go a step further and include the artifacts, or items that people have rated in common. With this information, it's possible to find the connection between a user making a query and one who has rated the item of interest, according to Ramakrishnan.
Although it’s laborious, a user could game the system and sift for connections that can be traced back to individuals, said Ramakrishnan. “By varying the ratings, you might notice that the recommendations change," he said. "In addition, you might notice that a particular recommendation of book X happens only for some specific values for ratings. If you know something about the algorithm behind the recommender system, then you could reverse-engineer the rating by inspecting the behavior of the algorithm."
To calculate the risk and benefit inherent in a given recommendation system, the researchers drafted a rough formula: benefit = w/l2, where w is a connection or connections between people who have rated the same item or items and l is a sequence of such connections.
"The... higher the w, the higher the benefit. The lower the l, the higher the benefit. The "squared" is there to make the second statement a little stronger than the first,” Ramakrishnan explained.
This formula applies to any recommender system that works by making connections, which is how most of today's e-commerce recommender systems work, said Ramakrishnan. "Its limitations are that it might have to be adjusted for individual domains. The formula as it stands is a good qualitative measure, nevertheless,” he said.
The key is presenting risk in terms of how a person relates to the larger social context of a recommender system, he said. "Thus, the same person with the same ratings may not be at risk in a recommender system where he is just like everybody else; it is his uniqueness [within a given system] that is posing the risk."
The risk equation can be likened to the way an individual can be singled out in a crowd, said Ramakrishnan. “If you look like everybody else, nobody can single you out. If you wear crazy clothes, you will be immediately spotted. Similarly, if you rate like everybody else, sure you get along and there is no danger,” he said. “If you rate crazily, on the one hand you provide a lot of benefit to the recommender, but then you are at risk.”
The researchers are aiming to demonstrate the risks inherent in such rating systems and broaden the context in which they are considered, said Ramakrishnan. "We're still studying this area," he said. They are looking into the causes of weak links, looking for other ways of quantifying benefit and risk and are looking to derive new ways to manage recommendation systems, he said.
The use of social network theory to study Web dynamics is compelling, although the seriousness of these risks is debatable, said David Madigan, a professor of statistics at Rutgers University.
“Making the connection with the social network literature is fascinating. [But] is the privacy threat real? I don't think so," Madigan said. The researchers' example of identifying someone through their ratings seems "far fetched in the context of large-scale e-commerce,” he said.
A more likely threat comes from old-fashioned violations of privacy agreements, according to Madigan. “While I might trust, say, amazon.com, a less trustworthy e-tailer might try my name and password on lots of other sites and get a complete picture of all the stuff I buy,” he said.
Ramakrishnan’s colleagues were Benjamin J. Keller and Batul J. Mirza of Virginia Tech, Ananth Y. Grama of Purdue University, and George Karypis of the University of Minnesota.
Timeline: Now
Funding: University
TRN Categories: Internet
Story Type: News
Related Elements: Technical paper, "When being Weak is Brave: Privacy Issues in Recommender Systems," posted on the Computing Research Repository at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.CG/0105028
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July 25, 2001
Page One
Sounds attract camera
Interface lets you point and speak
Quantum logic counts on geometry
T-shirt technique turns out flat screens
Rating systems put privacy at risk
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