Anonymizing Subsets of Social Networks with Degree Constrained Subgraphs

In recent years, concerns of privacy have become more prominent for social networks. Anonymizing a graph meaningfully is a challenging problem, as the original graph properties must be preserved as well as possible. We introduce a generalization of the degree anonymization problem posed by Liu and Terzi. In this problem, our goal is to anonymize a given subset of nodes while adding the fewest possible number of edges. The main contribution of this paper is an efficient algorithm for this problem by exploring its connection with the degree-constrained subgraph problem. Our experimental results show that our algorithm performs very well on many instances of social network data.