[Popcon-developers] Accessing popcon data

[Tássia Camões]

Hello Bill,

2011/3/23 Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert at math.u-bordeaux1.fr>:
>
> Now, it would be great if there was some research on how much information a recommendation
> system leaks, and how that can be mitigated. A whole new master project I am afraid.

I plan to bring this questions in my work, but I'll probably not go
too deep since my main goal is to develop the recommender.

Indeed, there are some researches in this field. As an example, there
is this article from researchers of University of Texas at Austin
which case study discusses how to break anonymity of the Netflix prize
dataset [1]. And in fact the contest was canceled after a privacy
lawsuit.

However I don't see these privacy issues as a problem of the
recommendation systems themselves, these leaks are all consequence of
the disclosure of the transactions database.
Netflix had to do it for the contest, since the participants could not
develop a solution without having access to the database. And so they
got suited.

In this project, what will be available is the recommender, not the
database. The recommendation is a result of processing the whole bunch
of data to give suggestions to a specific user based on commonalities
of behavior. I can't see how individual records could be tracked if
you only have access to the recommendation. Do you?

Regards,

Tássia.

[1] Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, Robust De-anonymization of
Large Sparse Datasets,
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/netflix-cancels-contest/