  Recommendation is one of the critical applications that helps users find
information relevant to their interests. However, a malicious attacker can
infer users' private information via recommendations. Prior work obfuscates
user-item data before sharing it with recommendation system. This approach does
not explicitly address the quality of recommendation while performing data
obfuscation. Moreover, it cannot protect users against private-attribute
inference attacks based on recommendations. This work is the first attempt to
build a Recommendation with Attribute Protection (RAP) model which
simultaneously recommends relevant items and counters private-attribute
inference attacks. The key idea of our approach is to formulate this problem as
an adversarial learning problem with two main components: the private attribute
inference attacker, and the Bayesian personalized recommender. The attacker
seeks to infer users' private-attribute information according to their items
list and recommendations. The recommender aims to extract users' interests
while employing the attacker to regularize the recommendation process.
Experiments show that the proposed model both preserves the quality of
recommendation service and protects users against private-attribute inference
attacks.
