A Privacy Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme to Investigate Apps Installment in Massive Mobile Devices

Currently, mobile devices often try obtaining the list of installed applications to survey the install ratio for advertisers and app owners to evaluate the market share of their applications. However, adversaries could yet infer or even directly learn the user's interests and personal information from his/her mobile application installations. Furthermore, this investigation, which could lead to user privacy leakage, now calls for more attention than ever before. Motivated to resolve the above issue, this paper presents a scheme to investigate the install ratio of mobile applications for app owners and advertisers while at the same time preserving the users' privacy. The scheme is executed with one round communication between a server and mobile devices. According to experiment results, the proposed scheme can balance privacy protection and publishing the application install ratio accurately. Furthermore, the proposed scheme also satisfies differential privacy. This paper has also given the curve fitting of the amount of mobile devices and a privacy budget. It may instruct users how to choose a privacy budget for a given amount of devices to investigate.