Section: New Results

Minimal Exposure

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux, Benjamin Nguyen.

When users request a service, the service provider usually asks for personal documents to tailor its service to the specific situation of the applicant. For example, the rate and duration of consumer's loans are usually adapted depending on the risk based on the income, assets or past lines of credits of the borrower. In practice, an excessive amount of personal data is collected and stored. Indeed, a paradox is at the root of this problem: service providers require users to expose data in order to determine whether that data is needed or not to achieve the purpose of the service. We currently explore a reverse approach, where service providers would publicly describe the data they require to complete their task, and where the applicants would confront those descriptions with their own data to determine themselves the minimal subset of information to expose. We have first investigated solutions for simplistic tasks (e.g., evaluating a decision tree to determine the loan rate and duration a given applicant can claim), and we plan to address more complex ones (e.g., building the profile of customers, mining association rules, etc.) in the short term. The work on Minimal Exposure has just started and a first paper is under evaluation.