FreeRec: an Anonymous and Distributed Personalization Architecture

Antoine Boutet (1) , Davide Frey (1) , Arnaud Jégou (1) , Anne-Marie Kermarrec (1) , Heverson Ribeiro (1)

1 ASAP - As Scalable As Possible: foundations of large scale dynamic distributed systems

We present and evaluate FreeRec, an anonymous decentral- ized peer-to-peer architecture, designed to bring personalization while protecting the privacy of its users. FreeRec's decentralized approach makes it independent of any entity wishing to collect personal data about users. At the same time, its onion-routing-like gossip-based overlay protocols effectively hide the association between users and their inter- est profiles without affecting the quality of personalization. The core of FreeRec consists of three layers of overlay protocols: the bottom layer, rps, consists of a standard random peer sampling protocol ensur- ing connectivity; the middle layer, PRPS, introduces anonymity by hid- ing users behind anonymous proxy chains, providing mutual anonymity; finally, the top clustering layer identifies for each anonymous user, a set of anonymous nearest neighbors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FreeRec by building a decentralized and anonymous content dissemina- tion system. Our evaluation by simulation, our PlanetLab experiments, and our probabilistic analysis show that FreeRec effectively decouples users from their profiles without hampering the quality of personalized content delivery.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Antoine Boutet, Davide Frey, Arnaud Jégou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Heverson Ribeiro. FreeRec: an Anonymous and Distributed Personalization Architecture. Computing, 2013. ⟨hal-00909127⟩