Abstract
We present City of Disguise, a retrieval game that tests how well searchers are able to reformulate some sensitive query in a ‘Taboo’-style setup but still retrieve good results. Given one of 200 sensitive information needs and a relevant example document, the players use a special ClueWeb12 search interface that also hints at potentially useful search terms. For an obfuscated query, the system assigns points depending on the result quality and the formulated query. In a pilot study with 72 players, we observed that they find obfuscations to retrieve relevant documents but often only when they relied on the suggested terms.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ahmad, W.U., Rahman, M., Wang, H.: Topic model based privacy protection in personalized web search. In: Perego, R., Sebastiani, F., Aslam, J.A., Ruthven, I., Zobel, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Italy, pp. 1025–1028. ACM (2016)
Arampatzis, A., Drosatos, G., Efraimidis, P.S.: A versatile tool for privacy-enhanced web search. In: Serdyukov, P., et al. (eds.) ECIR 2013. LNCS, vol. 7814, pp. 368–379. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36973-5_31
Arampatzis, A., Drosatos, G., Efraimidis, P.S.: Versatile query scrambling for private web search. Inf. Retr. J. 18(4), 331–358 (2015)
Arampatzis, A., Efraimidis, P., Drosatos, G.: Enhancing deniability against query-logs. In: Clough, P., et al. (eds.) ECIR 2011. LNCS, vol. 6611, pp. 117–128. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20161-5_13
Arampatzis, A., Efraimidis, P.S., Drosatos, G.: A query scrambler for search privacy on the internet. Inf. Retr. 16(6), 657–679 (2013)
Bevendorff, J., Stein, B., Hagen, M., Potthast, M.: Elastic ChatNoir: search engine for the ClueWeb and the common crawl. In: Pasi, G., Piwowarski, B., Azzopardi, L., Hanbury, A. (eds.) ECIR 2018. LNCS, vol. 10772, pp. 820–824. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_83
Collins-Thompson, K., Bennett, P.N., Diaz, F., Clarke, C., Voorhees, E.M.: TREC 2013 Web track overview. In: Voorhees, E.M. (ed.) Proceedings of The Twenty-Second Text REtrieval Conference, TREC 2013, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, November 19–22, 2013, NIST Special Publication, vol. 500–302, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (2013)
Collins-Thompson, K., Macdonald, C., Bennett, P.N., Diaz, F., Voorhees, E.M.: TREC 2014 Web track overview. In: Voorhees, E.M., Ellis, A. (eds.) Proceedings of The Twenty-Third Text REtrieval Conference, TREC 2014, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, November 19–21, 2014, NIST Special Publication, vol. 500–308, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (2014)
Culpepper, J.S., Diaz, F., Smucker, M.D.: Research frontiers in information retrieval: Report from the third strategic workshop on information retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL 2018). SIGIR Forum 52(1), 34–90 (2018)
Domingo-Ferrer, J., Solanas, A., Castellà-Roca, J.: H(k)-private information retrieval from privacy-uncooperative queryable databases. Online Inf. Rev. 33(4), 720–744 (2009)
Fröbe, M., Schmidt, E.O., Hagen, M.: Efficient query obfuscation with keyqueries. In: 20th International IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI-IAT 2021). ACM, December 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3486622.3493950, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3486622.3493950
Hong, Y., He, X., Vaidya, J., Adam, N.R., Atluri, V.: Effective anonymization of query logs. In: Cheung, D.W., Song, I., Chu, W.W., Hu, X., Lin, J.J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2009, Hong Kong, China, pp. 1465–1468. ACM (2009)
Karpukhin, V., et al.: Dense passage retrieval for open-domain question answering. In: Webber, B., Cohn, T., He, Y., Liu, Y. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2020, Online, November 16–20, 2020, pp. 6769–6781. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Kumar, R., Novak, J., Pang, B., Tomkins, A.: On anonymizing query logs via token-based hashing. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada, pp. 629–638 (2007)
Ma, H., Chandrasekar, R., Quirk, C., Gupta, A.: Page hunt: improving search engines using human computation games. In: Allan, J., Aslam, J.A., Sanderson, M., Zhai, C., Zobel, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2009, Boston, MA, USA, July 19–23, 2009, pp. 746–747. ACM (2009)
Pass, G., Chowdhury, A., Torgeson, C.: A picture of search. In: Jia, X. (ed.) Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Scalable Information Systems, Infoscale 2006, Hong Kong, 30 May–1 June, 2006. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, vol. 152, p. 1. ACM (2006)
Peddinti, S.T., Saxena, N.: On the privacy of web search based on query obfuscation: a case study of TrackMeNot. In: Atallah, M.J., Hopper, N.J. (eds.) PETS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6205, pp. 19–37. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14527-8_2
Peddinti, S.T., Saxena, N.: Web search query privacy: evaluating query obfuscation and anonymizing networks. J. Comput. Secur. 22(1), 155–199 (2014)
Toubiana, V., Subramanian, L., Nissenbaum, H.: TrackMeNot: enhancing the privacy of web search. CoRR arXiv:1109.4677 (2011)
Yang, P., Fang, H., Lin, J.: Anserini: Enabling the use of Lucene for information retrieval research. In: Kando, N., Sakai, T., Joho, H., Li, H., de Vries, A.P., White, R.W. (eds.) Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 1253–1256. ACM (2017)
Yates, A., Nogueira, R., Lin, J.: Pretrained transformers for text ranking: BERT and beyond. In: Diaz, F., Shah, C., Suel, T., Castells, P., Jones, R., Sakai, T. (eds.) SIGIR ’21: The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Virtual Event, Canada, July 11–15, 2021, pp. 2666–2668. ACM (2021)
Yu, P., Ahmad, W.U., Wang, H.: Hide-n-Seek: an intent-aware privacy protection plugin for personalized web search. In: Collins-Thompson, K., Mei, Q., Davison, B.D., Liu, Y., Yilmaz, E. (eds.) The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, pp. 1333–1336. ACM (2018)
Zhang, S., Yang, G.H., Singh, L.: Anonymizing query logs by differential privacy. In: Perego, R., Sebastiani, F., Aslam, J.A., Ruthven, I., Zobel, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Italy, pp. 753–756. ACM (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fröbe, M., Libera, N.L., Hagen, M. (2022). City of Disguise: A Query Obfuscation Game on the ClueWeb. In: Hagen, M., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_34
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_34
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99738-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99739-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)