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Multi-party Methods for Privacy-Preserving Web Search: Survey and Contributions

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Book cover Advanced Research in Data Privacy

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 567))

Abstract

Web search engines (WSEs) locate keywords on websites and retrieve contents from the World Wide Web. To be successful among its users, the WSE must return the results that best match their interests. For this purpose, WSEs collect and analyze users’ search history and build profiles. Although this brings immediate benefits to the user, it is also a threat for her privacy in the long term. Profiles are built from past queries and other related data that may contain private and personal information. Consequently, researchers on this field have developed different approaches whose objective is to avoid this privacy threat and protect users of WSEs. One way to classify the existing alternatives is between single-party and multi-party. The former approach allows users to protect their privacy in front of the WSE without requiring the cooperation of others. The latter requires that a group of users or entities collaborate in order to protect the privacy of each member of the group. This work focuses on multi-party schemes. First, current solutions in this field are surveyed, their differences are analyzed and their advantages (and shortcomings) are stressed. Finally, our own contributions to this area are presented and evaluated.

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Acknowledgments

Authors are solely responsible for the views expressed in this text, which do not necessarily reflect the position of UNESCO nor commit that organization. This work was partly supported by the European Commission under FP7 project Inter-Trust, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (through projects eAEGIS TSI2007-65406-C03-01, CO-PRIVACY TIN2011-27076-C03-01, ARES-CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00004, Audit Transparency Voting Process IPT-430000-2010-31, ICWT TIN2012-32757 and BallotNext IPT-2012-0603-430000) and by the Government of Catalonia (under grant 2009 SGR 1135).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament d’Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. Països Catalans 26, 43007, Tarragona, Spain

    Cristina Romero-Tris, Alexandre Viejo & Jordi Castellà-Roca

Authors
  1. Cristina Romero-Tris
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  2. Alexandre Viejo
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  3. Jordi Castellà-Roca
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Romero-Tris .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Guillermo Navarro-Arribas

  2. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Campus de la UAB, Institut d'Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial, Catalonia, Spain

    Vicenç Torra

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Romero-Tris, C., Viejo, A., Castellà-Roca, J. (2015). Multi-party Methods for Privacy-Preserving Web Search: Survey and Contributions. In: Navarro-Arribas, G., Torra, V. (eds) Advanced Research in Data Privacy. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 567. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09885-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09885-2_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09884-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09885-2

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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