Achieving Privacy-Preserving Group Recommendation with Local Differential Privacy and Random Transmission

Abstract

Group activities on social networks are increasing rapidly with the development of mobile devices and IoT terminals, creating a huge demand for group recommendation. However, group recommender systems are facing an important problem of privacy leakage on user’s historical data and preference. Existing solutions always pay attention to protect the historical data but ignore the privacy of preference. In this paper, we design a privacy-preserving group recommendation scheme, consisting of a personalized recommendation algorithm and a preference aggregation algorithm. With the carefully introduced local differential privacy (LDP), our personalized recommendation algorithm can protect user’s historical data in each specific group. We also propose an Intra-group transfer Privacy-preserving Preference Aggregation algorithm (IntPPA). IntPPA protects each group member’s personal preference against either the untrusted servers or other users. It could also defend long-term observation attack. We also conduct several experiments to measure the privacy-preserving effect and usability of our scheme with some closely related schemes. Experimental results on two datasets show the utility and privacy of our scheme and further illustrate its advantages.