Privacy-aware spam detection in social bookmarking systems

ABSTRACT

With the increased popularity of Web 2.0 services in the last years data privacy has become a major concern for users. The more personal data users reveal, the more difficult it becomes to control its disclosure in the web. However, for Web 2.0 service providers, the data provided by users is a valuable source for offering effective, personalised data mining services. One major application is the detection of spam in social bookmarking systems: in order to prevent a decrease of content quality, providers need to distinguish spammers and exclude them from the system. They thereby experience a conflict of interests: on the one hand, they need to identify spammers based on the information they collect about users, on the other hand, they need to respect privacy concerns and process as few personal data as possible. It would therefore be of tremendous help for system developers and users to know which personal data are needed for spam detection and which can be ignored. In this paper we address these questions by presenting a data privacy aware feature engineering approach. It consists of the design of features for spam classification which are evaluated according to both, performance and privacy conditions. Experiments using data from the social bookmarking system BibSonomy show that both conditions must not exclude each other.

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Index Terms

• General and reference

  • Cross-computing tools and techniques

    • Performance

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Software management

        • Software selection and adaptation

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Extra-functional properties

      • Software performance