2015 International Conference on Pervasive Computing (ICPC)
Clustering Based Anonymization For Privacy
Preservation
Rashmi B. Ghate
PG Student, Dept. CT
Y.C.C.E
Nagpur, India
ghaterashmi0@gmail.com
Abstract— while registering on social networking site, it is
necessary to give the personal information; some of this
information is sensitive and needed to be preserved. To sustain
the privacy of user on a social network Anonymization technique
is employed. In Anonymization approach individuals personal
information is either mask or remove from the dataset so
individual’s data become anonymous. When a dataset is released
it is important to prevent data from unwanted disclosure, balance
the usefulness and privacy of published dataset. Proposed work
gives the Anonymized view of a data set and the result of
implementation of the single pass k-means Anonymization
algorithm. To Anonymized the dataset generalization and
suppression approaches are used.
Keywords— Anonymization; Generalization; K-Means; Social
Network; Suppression
I. INTRODUCTION
Social networks have tremendously gained popularity
over the internet. On social networks individuals are sharing
data about their professional business and private lives. These
networks store the personal information about the individuals;
thus social networks become a vast pool of data. This
information holds user’s public data as well as private data.
On social network public information is publicly shared by
individuals and by default seen by everyone and private
information contains personal data about them which
individual wants to be protected. Now a day’s social network
data is released, this data used by research people, business
people for professional and analysis purpose. Directly
releasing such information on the internet may damage the
privacy of social network user. On social network may harm
the user’s privacy and direct disclosure of individual’s
information. Thus to preserve the privacy on social network
many users prefer to hide their real identity this is caused by
using Anonymization Technique. Anonymization is the
technique where encryption or removal personal information
QI (Quasi Identifier Attributes) from the dataset so that to
whom data set is described remains protected. When datasets
is released it is important to prevent data from unwanted
disclosure and balance the usefulness and privacy of released
dataset. To minimize the risk of direct access of Quasi
Identifier attributes from the dataset, generalization and
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Rasika Ingle
Asst. Prof. Dept. CT
Y.C.C.E.
Nagpur, India
meet.rasika@gmail.com
suppression techniques are employed. In the generalization
Quasi Identifier attributes value can be more generalized and
in suppression Quasi Identifier attributes value replace the
original value with specific value. By implementing
generalization and suppression on to the dataset it prevents the
danger of unwanted disclosure data maintain the
confidentiality of the dataset and preserves the secrecy of data
set while publishing dataset used for research areas and
business areas. Anonymization is used to increase the privacy
of social network users.
This work proposes Anonymization techniques,
based on clustering. Clustering involves modifying K-Means
Clustering for clustering of the dataset. Generalization and
suppression are the techniques used to Anonymized the
dataset and avoid the direct access to the dataset, which also
protects the Quasi Identifier attributes from unwanted
disclosure and preserve the privacy. The structure of the paper
contains the following sections. Literature survey is given
regarding Anonymization given in section II. Overview of
Clustering based Anonymization is given for privacy
preservation of dataset in Section III, we give the
Implementation of single Pass K-Means Anonymization
algorithm in Section IV, and Conclude the paper in section V
with the Future Work.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Now a day’s keeping the privacy while revealing
individuals information over social network is essential. A
brief survey on Anonymization technique [1] Zhou, Pei, Luk
gives reviews of the existing methods used for
Anonymization for sustaining the privacy of revealing data on
social network, Recognize the challenges in the maintaining
secrecy while publishing of social network information and
analyze the feasible issues in these important categories
privacy, background knowledge, and data utility.
Anonymization approach is based on clustering-based and
graph modification based. [2] Elena zheleva & Lise Getoor
presents a potential privacy breach in ONS (online social
networks) with some current privacy definitions and
techniques for maintaining the confidentiality of the users. [3]
Prateek Joshi and c. -c. Jay Kuo gives mathematical
formulation as well as computational models privacy and
security of social network data, and present the metrics for [9]. Anonymized view of the dataset prevents individual’s data
computing the total amount of privacy as well as security in from unwanted disclosure.
social network. [4] Meng-Cheng Wei and Jun-Lin Lin and,
presents a model for k-anonymity, to reduce the loss of
information during generalization process to anonymized the
data, To combine the same type of data in single group is
necessary; individual anonymous set of data and clustering
based k-Anonymity technique executes in O (n2/k) time.
Author practically compares their techniques with other
clustering based k-Anonymity techniques. [5] A.
Machanavajjhala, j. Gehrke and d. Kifer gives two types of
and attacks on k-Anonymized dataset and gives a new
powerful privacy approach called as “l-diversity”. [6] Fig. 1. Block Diagram of Complete Anonymization Process
Mingxun Yuan Lie Chen presents k-degree l-diversity
representation for the preservation of structural data as well
IV. IMPLEMENTATION
as personal label of individuals and creates a new
Aanonymization method by including noise nodes to bring on A. Creation of Data Set
a novel algorithm. [7] N. Mogre, g. Agrawal and p. Patil gives
status-of-art methods for privacy of the high dimensional For creation of the Social network dataset, MS Excel
database and admit a new slicing technique for high database used, In data set ten fields (attributes) are there.
dimensional data sets. [8] Dror j. Cohen and Tamir Tassa Attributes of data set are UID, E-Mail, Age, Gender, Mobile
gives the issues of privacy protection on social networks and No., Zip Code, Country, Relationship status, Income,
the goal is to get the Anonymizied view of data without Profession. From these attributes Age, Gender, Mobile No,
revealing any information about the individuals and the and Relationship Status are the Quasi Identifier attributes,
relationships in between the other individuals on social which are anonymized.
networks. Author starts with the centralized setting and
provides two forms of Anonymization algorithm based on
sequential clustering.

Thus the propose work states that Anonymization of

social network dataset is an important concern to keep the
secrecy of the dataset while publishing. To Anonymized the
data set clustering technique is applied. Clustering is of the
data set is done by implementing K-Means Algorithm (Single
Pass K-Means Anonymization Algorithm). Generalization and
Suppression approaches are used to maintain confidentiality of
the dataset and get the anonymized view of the dataset.
Fig. 2. Data Set of Social Network

III. AN OVERVIEW OF CLUSTERING BASED

ANONYMIZATION
In terms of data mining, clustering is a effective and
efficient technique that partition data from dataset into clusters
such that data within a cluster are more similar to other, while
other data in different clusters are most distinct can be used for
k-Anonymization. The primary goal in publishing the
Anonymized data set of social network is to deduce the
methods of predicting the private data from public data [9]. K-
means clustering is widely used for clustering of data on a
social network. As a technique for clustering of data from the
dataset, K-means algorithm is widely practiced because of its
ease and ability to converge very fast in practice [10]. To
preserve the privacy on social networks need to Anonymized
the dataset. To achieve the Anonymization, have to create the
clusters of the dataset. K-Means clustering algorithm is used
to achieve the K-Anonymity. In proposing work sequential
clustering algorithm of K-Means are used for Anonymization
B. Creating Clusters by Implementing Single Pass K-Means
Anonymization
To implement Single Pass K-Means Anonymization
algorithm [9], first all the records in data set D are sorted by
their QI (quasi identifiers). Then arbitrarily select k number of
records as the initial cluster centers of cluster to generate a K
number of clusters, each record belongs to data set D. Assigns
record r to the its closest cluster center. Apart from K-Means
clustering algorithm, whenever record added to the cluster,
every time center of cluster gets updated. The effectiveness of
the next insertion of the records to the clusters gets improved.
After forming clusters required changes are worked on cluster
to minimize the data losses. The count of records in clusters
with more than k number of records some records are removed
and afterword added these records to the clusters with less than
k records. If all clusters contain a count of records no less than
k records and still there are some records have not been
assigned to any cluster means those records will be assigned to
Fig. 3. Cluster of Data Set
C. Generalization And Suppression
In Generalization technique replace quasi-identifiers and
set of non-identifying attributes such as age or zip codes
with less specific and less informative but semantically
consistent values or replace the attribute value with its more
generalized value. For example the zip codes {47824,
47865, 47843} can be generalized to 478** by stripping the
rightmost digits. Suppression does not release the value at
all or replace the attribute value with specialized value. For
example the gender {Male, Female} attribute is completely
suppressed to *.It can also be done by removing individual
attribute values or by partitioning the attribute domain into
intervals [11].
Fig. 4. Generalization of Data Set
Fig. 5. Suppression of Data Set
their respective closest cluster's center.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, to achieve clustering based
Anonymization for preserve the privacy on social network,
Anonymization technique is used. Here we succeffully
Implement the Single Pass K Means Anonymization
Algorithm, apply generalization and suppression process on
dataset to get the Anonymized view of data set. In future we
Measure the information loss during generalization process
of dataset; apply t-closeness measure. Study and
implementation of the different approach of Single pass K-
means Anonymization algorithm and conclude the
comparative study of different approaches of algorithm.
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