Social behavior metadata has altered business models and human lifestyles. However, the inclusion of personal information in social behavior metadata poses risks of identity exposure for users. Under the requirements of modern data management laws, service providers now employ anonymization techniques when collecting user behavior metadata, which aims to break the link between personal identifiers and behavioral attributes for privacy protection. This paper conducts experiments on an open-source dataset of anonymized social behavior metadata and finds that even with privacy protection techniques such as data generalization, there remains a high risk of reidentification. Specifically, four social behavior metadata records are sufficient to reidentify users from the anonymized social behavior metadata, achieving a unicity of \(90.10\%\) . This indicates that the current widespread collection of social behavior metadata brings a high risk of privacy breaches.

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Behavioral Unicity: On the Limits of Anonymized Social Behavior Metadata

  • Hao Tang,
  • Cheng Wang

摘要

Social behavior metadata has altered business models and human lifestyles. However, the inclusion of personal information in social behavior metadata poses risks of identity exposure for users. Under the requirements of modern data management laws, service providers now employ anonymization techniques when collecting user behavior metadata, which aims to break the link between personal identifiers and behavioral attributes for privacy protection. This paper conducts experiments on an open-source dataset of anonymized social behavior metadata and finds that even with privacy protection techniques such as data generalization, there remains a high risk of reidentification. Specifically, four social behavior metadata records are sufficient to reidentify users from the anonymized social behavior metadata, achieving a unicity of \(90.10\%\) . This indicates that the current widespread collection of social behavior metadata brings a high risk of privacy breaches.