An approach for the protection of users’ book browsing preference privacy in a digital library
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-07-2017-0162 |
| Published date | 10 December 2018 |
| Date | 10 December 2018 |
| Pages | 1154-1166 |
| Author | Zongda Wu,Chengren Zheng,Jian Xiejian,Zhifeng Zhou,Guandong Xu,Enhong Chen |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
An approach for the protection of
users’book browsing preference
privacy in a digital library
Zongda Wu
Oujiang College, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, China
Chengren Zheng,Jian Xiejian and Zhifeng Zhou
Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, China
Guandong Xu
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and
Enhong Chen
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Abstract
Purpose –The problem of privacy protection in digital libraries is causing people to have increasingly
extensive concerns. This study aims to design an approach to protect the preference privacy behind users’
book browsingbehaviors in a digital library.
Design/methodology/approach –This paper proposes a client-basedapproach, whose basic idea is to
construct a group of plausible book browsingdummy behaviors, and submit them together with users’true
behaviorsto the untrusted server, to cover up users’sensitive preferences.
Findings –Both security analysis and evaluation experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the
approach, which canensure the privacy security of users’book browsing preferenceson the untrusted digital
library server,without compromising the usability,accuracy and efficiency of book services.
Originality/value –To the best of the authors’knowledge, this paper provides the first attempt to the
protection of users’behavior privacy in digital libraries, which will have a positive influence on the
developmentof privacy-preserving libraries in the new networkera.
Keywords Digital library, Behaviour preference, Book browsing, Personal privacy
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
With the rapid development of network technologies, digital libraries have become an
important part of people’s daily life. However, although providing conveniences for users,
digital libraries, owing to collecting massive personal information, result in users having
serious concerns on privacy security(Gangadharan, 2017;Han et al., 2016;Mohammed and
Esther, 2012). As pointedout in the works by Li et al. (2010) and Zhang et al. (2012), although
the development of laws and regulations related to user privacy can mitigate the issue on
user privacy to a certain extent, it cannot solve the problem fundamentally, so technical
means may be more suitable for the protectionof user privacy in digital libraries. In digital
libraries, userprivacy can be divided into two types: data privacy (e.g.ID number and phone)
and behavior privacy, i.e. the preferencescontained in users’service requests (e.g. user’s book
browsing behaviors can reflectsome categories of interest to the user). The security of users’
data privacy can be ensured by encryption (Pang et al.,2012;Wu et al., 2015). However,
EL
36,6
1154
Received8 August 2017
Revised22 September 2017
5 November2017
Accepted9 December 2017
TheElectronic Library
Vol.36 No. 6, 2018
pp. 1154-1166
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-07-2017-0162
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