Protecting Your Shopping Preference with Differential Privacy

Online banks may disclose consumers' shopping preferences due to various attacks. With differential privacy, each consumer can disturb his consumption amount locally before sending it to online banks. However, directly applying differential privacy in online banks will incur problems in reality because existing differential privacy schemes do not consider handling the noise boundary problem. In this paper, we propose an Optimized Differential prIvate Online tRansaction scheme (O-DIOR) for online banks to set boundaries of consumption amounts with added noises. We then revise O-DIOR to design a RO-DIOR scheme to select different boundaries while satisfying the differential privacy definition. Moreover, we provide in-depth theoretical analysis to prove that our schemes are capable to satisfy the differential privacy constraint. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness, we have implemented our schemes in mobile payment experiments. Experimental results illustrate that the relevance between the consumption amount and online bank amount is reduced significantly, and the privacy losses are less than 0.5 in terms of mutual information.