Game theoretic data privacy preservation: Equilibrium and pricing

Privacy issues arising in the process of collecting, publishing and mining individuals' personal data have attracted much attention in recent years. In this paper, we consider a scenario where a data collector collects data from data providers and then publish the data to a data user. To protect data providers' privacy, the data collector performs anonymization on the data. Anonymization usually causes a decline of data utility on which the data user's profit depends, meanwhile, data providers' would provide more data if anonymity is strongly guaranteed. How to make a trade-off between privacy protection and data utility is an important question for data collector. In this paper we model the interactions among data providers/collector/user as a game, and propose a general approach to find the Nash equilibriums of the game. To elaborate the analysis, we also present a specific game formulation which takes k-anonymity as the anonymization method. Simulation results show that the game theoretical analysis can help the data collector to deal with the privacy-utility trade-off.