Personalized Privacy Preserving Method for Social Networks Graph k-Anonymization

Nowadays, with the development of social networks, the risk of disclosure of users’ information has also increased, which has caused serious concerns among users. Accordingly, privacy preserving on social networks is a significant issue that has attracted much attention. Although there are various methods for preserving privacy on social networks, most of the existing methods are based on the universal approach that considers the same level of preservation for all users and only some of them consider individual personalized privacy requirements, which is very limited, and those are based on users’ willing to share friends list and sensitive information with other users.  This study focuses on a new scheme of personalized privacy preserving based on k-anonymity which can anonymize the social network graph based on the personalized privacy requirements of each individual. We develop a Modified Degree Privacy Level Sequence (MDPLS) Algorithm and execute experiments on two datasets. The results of the experiments show that in this new method of social network graph anonymization, when we consider the personalized privacy requirements, the costs of the anonymity process are reduced and data utility is improved in comparison with the situation where we only consider one level of privacy for all users, i.e., universal approach.