Abstract: Link prediction is widely used to predict and recommend social relationships in social networks. However, it requires users’ personal information, leading to great risks to users’ privacy. To prevent privacy leakage, users may refuse to provide needed information to the service provider, which in turn brings in decreases on the effectiveness of link prediction, and further hurts user experience. To eliminate the concerns of privacy disclosure and encourage users to provide more data for link prediction, we propose personalized privacy preserving link prediction in social network. We get rid of the full dependence on the service provider and friends by making users and the service provider cooperate to complete the process of link prediction. Also, we attach different magnitude noise with personalized privacy settings, maintaining the effectiveness of link prediction while protecting sensitive links and sensitive attributes. Finally, theoretical analysis is provided based on differential privacy, and experimental results on real world datasets show that our proposed methods can provide better privacy protection while maintaining the effectiveness of link prediction.

Key words: link prediction, social network, privacy protection, personalized, differential privacy