Privacy Consensus in Anonymization Systems Via Game Theory

Abstract

Privacy protection appears as a fundamental concern when personal data is collected, stored, and published. Several anonymization methods have been proposed to protect individuals' privacy before data publishing. Each anonymization method has at least one parameter to adjust the level of privacy protection. Choosing a desirable level of privacy protection is a crucial decision because it affects the volume and usability of collected data differently. In this paper, we demonstrate how to use game theory to model different and conflicting needs of parties involved in making such decision. We describe a general approach to solve such games and elaborate the procedure using k-anonymity as a sample anonymization method. Our model provides a generic framework to find stable values for privacy parameters within each anonymization method, to recognize the characteristics of each anonymization method, and to compare different anonymization methods to distinguish the settings that make one method more appealing than the others.