A Privacy Preservation Method for Attributed Social Network Based on Negative Representation of Information

Due to the presence of a large amount of personal sensitive information in social networks, privacy preservation issues in social networks have attracted the attention of many scholars. Inspired by the self-nonself discrimination paradigm in the biological immune system, the negative representation of information indicates features such as simplicity and efficiency, which is very suitable for preserving social network privacy. Therefore, we suggest a method to preserve the topology privacy and node attribute privacy of attribute social networks, called AttNetNRI. Specifically, a negative survey-based method is developed to disturb the relationship between nodes in the social network so that the topology structure can be kept private. Moreover, a negative database-based method is proposed to hide node attributes, so that the privacy of node attributes can be preserved while supporting the similarity estimation between different node attributes, which is crucial to the analysis of social networks. To evaluate the performance of the AttNetNRI, empirical studies have been conducted on various attribute social networks and compared with several state-of-the-art methods tailored to preserve the privacy of social networks. The experimental results show the superiority of the developed method in preserving the privacy of attribute social networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of the topology disturbing and attribute hiding parts. The experimental results show the superiority of the developed methods in preserving the privacy of attribute social networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of the topological interference and attribute-hiding components.