Scalable non-deterministic clustering-based k -anonymization for rich networks

In this paper, we tackle the problem of graph anonymization in the context of privacy-preserving social network mining. We present a greedy and non-deterministic algorithm to achieve k-anonymity on labeled and undirected networks. Our work aims to create a scalable algorithm for real-world big networks, which runs in parallel and uses biased randomization for improving the quality of the solutions. We propose new metrics that consider the utility of the clusters from a recommender system point of view. We compare our approach to SaNGreeA, a well-known state-of-the-art algorithm for k-anonymity generalization. Finally, we have performed scalability tests, with up to 160 machines within the Hadoop framework, for anonymizing a real-world dataset with around 830 K nodes and 63 M relationships, demonstrating our method’s utility and practical applicability.