Grant: Engage Grants Program

Pricerazzi is a Canadian start-up company that provides price matching service to consumers that purchase goods from retailers that offer price matching. The company owns a large database of goods and transactions submitted by customers. This information has tremendous value for marketing research. The company is interested in making the data available to third parties through a web interface, where users would request various pieces of aggregate information from the database. An example of query is finding the average price paid for a particular item within a geographical area. The main concern for the company is to protect the privacy of their customers whose information is in the database. More precisely, the objective is to make it very difficult for a malicious user to query the database and link a particular individual to records contained in the database even, if auxiliary information not in the database is available to the attacker. The objective of this project is to develop the appropriate privacy mechanisms that would allow the company to meet its data anonymization objectives. The system to be developed is based on state of the art theoretical studies on data anonymization. The research challenges to be overcome are designing appropriate algorithms and data structures that allow the system to be efficient in practice and to scale well with the growing size of the database.