Due to the recent popularity of online social networks, coupled with people's\npropensity to disclose personal information in an effort to achieve certain\ngratifications, the problem of navigating the tradeoff between privacy and\nutility attracted a lot of recent interest and generated a rich body of\nresearch. A critical prerequisite to solving the problem is to appropriately\ncapture the privacy and the utility aspects in the problem formulation. Most of\nthe existing works' focus is on the notion of privacy, while utility loss is\noften treated as the undesirable but necessary distortion of the true data,\nintroduced by the privacy mechanism. By contrast, we are interested in\nmodelling utility differently, by associating it with specific attributes of a\nuser, just like privacy is associated with specific private attributes in the\nliterature. Our model of utility facilitates a better and more precise privacy\nmechanism, and achieves better privacy-utility tradeoffs. We further\nincorporate into our problem formulation a practical constraint on acceptable\nloss in utility per unit gain in privacy, which allows users to customize the\nprivacy mechanisms in order to account for the relative values that each user\nassociates with their own privacy and utility. This paper discusses the\nintricacies of our utility model and the corresponding privacy-utility\ntradeoff, and introduces a heuristic greedy algorithm to solve the problem.\n