Search Engine Based Proper Privacy Protection Scheme

In the era of the “Internet of everything,”people and devices are interconnected and keep exchanging private information, including confidential data about personal identity, locations, payments, transactions, and so on. The privacy leakage problem also becomes an essential security issue that challenges the management and authentication of these private information, which even restricts the communication efficiency in different “things.”With the occurrence of serious information security incidents, such as the Facebook data breach event in March 2018, more and more attention has been taken into protecting private information from leakage or misuse. The existing private information protection mechanisms are mostly built on the basis of data encryption, access control, or user authentication, bearing two shortcomings: (1) strictly protecting data but sacrificing the data usage efficiency; and (2) rare consideration of the related application scenario information. In this paper, a privacy information protection scheme is proposed, where private data is protected differently based on the data attributes and application scenarios, ensuring that the private data is “properly protected”. We first investigate the specific attributes of private data based on the search engine (Google) in different application scenarios, such as the data importance and dependence. Based on these attributes, private data are divided into four security domains in a given application scenario, which is further protected by applying different protection policies. By implementing the proposed scheme, it has been demonstrated that our protection scheme can balance well between the security and usage convenience of private information.