Query Profile Obfuscation by Means of Optimal Query Exchange between Users

We address the problem of query profile obfuscation by means of partial query exchanges between two users, in order for their profiles of interest to appear distorted to the information provider (database, search engine, etc.). We illustrate a methodology to reach mutual privacy gain, that is, a situation where both users increase their own privacy protection through collaboration in query exchange. To this end, our approach starts with a mathematical formulation, involving the modeling of the users' apparent profiles as probability distributions over categories of interest, and the measure of their privacy as the corresponding Shannon entropy. The question of which query categories to exchange translates into finding optimization variables representing exchange policies, for various optimization objectives based on those entropies, possibly under exchange traffic constraints.