Differentially Private Stream Processing for the Semantic Web

Abstract

Data often contains sensitive information, which poses a major obstacle to publishing it. Some suggest to obfuscate the data or only releasing some data statistics. These approaches have, however, been shown to provide insufficient safeguards against de-anonymisation. Recently, differential privacy (DP), an approach that injects noise into the query answers to provide statistical privacy guarantees, has emerged as a solution to release sensitive data. This study investigates how to continuously release privacy-preserving histograms (or distributions) from online streams of sensitive data by combining DP and semantic web technologies. We focus on distributions, as they are the basis for many analytic applications. Specifically, we propose SihlQL, a query language that processes RDF streams in a privacy-preserving fashion. SihlQL builds on top of SPARQL and the w-event DP framework. We show how some peculiarities of w-event privacy constrain the expressiveness of SihlQL queries. Addressing these constraints, we propose an extension of w-event privacy that provides answers to a larger class of queries while preserving their privacy. To evaluate SihlQL, we implemented a prototype engine that compiles queries to Apache Flink topologies and studied its privacy properties using real-world data from an IPTV provider and an online e-commerce web site.