Policy Based Safe Interactive access framework for Web search logs

Web search logs are of growing importance to researchers for a variety of reasons such as understanding search behaviour, search engine performance etc. However, search logs may contain a lot of private information about the users and therefore must be released with care. In this talk, we will review existing approaches to releasing log information and the ensuing trade-off between privacy and utility. We will then describe our proposed policy based safe interactive access framework for releasing search logs with the additional goal of balancing privacy and utility. In our system, differential privacy is used as the underlying privacy enforcement mechanism. Preliminary results indicate that our approach can provide utility to researchers while still protecting the privacy of the users. We will also present results from our user study to understand the privacy implications of our framework.