  With a rapidly increasing number of devices connected to the internet, big
data has been applied to various domains of human life. Nevertheless, it has
also opened new venues for breaching users' privacy. Hence it is highly
required to develop techniques that enable data owners to privatize their data
while keeping it useful for intended applications. Existing methods, however,
do not offer enough flexibility for controlling the utility-privacy trade-off
and may incur unfavorable results when privacy requirements are high. To tackle
these drawbacks, we propose a compressive-privacy based method, namely RUCA
(Ratio Utility and Cost Analysis), which can not only maximize performance for
a privacy-insensitive classification task but also minimize the ability of any
classifier to infer private information from the data. Experimental results on
Census and Human Activity Recognition data sets demonstrate that RUCA
significantly outperforms existing privacy preserving data projection
techniques for a wide range of privacy pricings.
