Hiding in the Crowd: Privacy Preservation on Evolving Streams through Correlation Tracking

We address the problem of preserving privacy in streams, which has received surprisingly limited attention. For static data, a well-studied and widely used approach is based on random perturbation of the data values. However, streams pose additional challenges. First, analysis of the data has to be performed incrementally, using limited processing time and buffer space, making batch approaches unsuitable. Second, the characteristics of streams evolve over time. Consequently, approaches based on global analysis of the data are not adequate. We show that it is possible to efficiently and effectively track the correlation and autocorrelation structure of multivariate streams and leverage it to add noise which maximally preserves privacy, in the sense that it is very hard to remove. Our techniques achieve much better results than previous static, global approaches, while requiring limited processing time and memory. We provide both a mathematical analysis and experimental evaluation on real data to validate the correctness, efficiency, and effectiveness of our algorithms.