Toward Privacy-Preserving Personalized Recommendation Services

Recommendation systems are crucially important for the delivery of personalized services to users. With personalized recommendation services, users can enjoy a variety of targeted recommendations such as movies, books, ads, restaurants, and more. In addition, personalized recommendation services have become extremely effective revenue drivers for online business. Despite the great benefits, deploying personalized recommendation services typically requires the collection of users’ personal data for processing and analytics, which undesirably makes users susceptible to serious privacy violation issues. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to develop practical privacy-preserving techniques to maintain the intelligence of personalized recommendation services while respecting user privacy. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the literature related to personalized recommendation services with privacy protection. We present the general architecture of personalized recommendation systems, the privacy issues therein, and existing works that focus on privacy-preserving personalized recommendation services. We classify the existing works according to their underlying techniques for personalized recommendation and privacy protection, and thoroughly discuss and compare their merits and demerits, especially in terms of privacy and recommendation accuracy. We also identity some future research directions.