Abstract

Analyzing social networks reveals the relationships between individuals and groups in the data. However, such analysis can also lead to privacy exposure (whether intentionally or inadvertently): leaking the real-world identity of ostensibly anonymous individuals. Most sanitization strategies modify the graph’s structure based on hypothesized tactics that an adversary would employ. While combining multiple anonymization schemes provides a more comprehensive privacy protection, deciding the appropriate set of techniques-along with evaluating how applying the strategies will affect the utility of the anonymized results-remains a significant challenge. To address this problem, we introduce GraphProtector, a visual interface that guides a user through a privacy preservation pipeline. GraphProtector enables multiple privacy protection schemes which can be simultaneously combined together as a hybrid approach. To demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphPro tector, we report several case studies and feedback collected from interviews with expert users in various scenarios.