On-Device Algorithms for Public-Private Data with Absolute Privacy

Motivated by the increasing need to preserve privacy in digital devices, we introduce the on-device public-private model of computation. Our motivation comes from social-network based recommender systems in which the users want to receive recommendations based on the information available on their devices, as well as the suggestions of their social contacts, without sharing such information or contacts with the central recommendation system. Our model allows us to solve many algorithmic problems while providing absolute (deterministic) guarantees of the privacy of on-device data and the user's contacts. In fact, we ensure that the private data and private contacts are never revealed to the central system. Our restrictive model of computation presents several interesting algorithmic challenges because any computation based on private information and contacts must be performed on local devices of limited capabilities. Despite these challenges, under realistic assumptions of inter-device communication, we show several efficient algorithms for fundamental data mining and machine learning problems, ranging from k-means clustering to heavy hitters. We complement this analysis with strong impossibility results for efficient private algorithms without allowing inter-device communication. In our experimental evaluation, we show that our private algorithms provide results almost as accurate as those of the non-private ones while speeding up the on-device computations by orders of magnitude.

• Data Mining and Modeling

• Algorithms and Theory