Privacy Protection in Enterprise Social Networks Using a Hybrid De-Identification System

Enterprise social networks (ESN) have been widely used within organizations as a communication infrastructure that allows employees to collaborate with each other and share files and documents. The shared documents may contain a large amount of sensitive information that affect the privacy of persons such as phone numbers, which must be protected against any kind of disclosure or unauthorized access. In this study, authors propose a hybrid de-identification system that extract sensitive information from textual documents shared in ESNs. The system is based on both machine learning and rule-based classifiers. Gradient boosted trees (GBTs) algorithm is used as machine learning classifier. Experiments ran on a modified CoNLL 2003 dataset show that GBTs algorithm achieve a very high F1-score (95%). Additionally, the rule-based classifier is consisted of regular expression and gazetteers in order to complement the machine learning classifier. Thereafter, the sensitive information extracted by the two classifiers are merged and encrypted using Format Preserving Encryption method.