Rings for privacy: An architecture for privacy-preserving user profiling

In present days, where anyone stays online nearly everywhere and everytime, it is crucial from the viewpoint of service providers to collect consumers data, so that questions such as “what kind of advertisement do they click on?”, “what do they buy online?”, “what IP-TV channels do they watch?” and “what do they like to do on social networks?” are answered and some relevant information about the users' habits and likes are extracted, resold for business, or employed to provide services that are better tailored to the customers' interests. Several privacy issues have however to be taken into account, when sensitive data are managed. We believe that approaches which guarantee the users' privacy have to be pursued: accordingly, we put forth a solution that performs users' profiling and keeps sensitive information private; additionally, it lends itself to a decentralized, cost-effective implementation.