Privacy preserving sentiment analysis on multiple edge data streams with Apache NiFi

Abstract

Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, plays a big role in both private and public sector Business Intelligence (BI); it attempts to improve public and customer experience. Nevertheless, de-identified sentiment scores from public social media posts can compromise individual privacy due to their vulnerability to record linkage attacks. Established privacy-preserving methods like k-anonymity, l-diversity and t-closeness are offline models exclusively designed for data at rest. Recently, a number of online anonymization algorithms (CASTLE, SKY, SWAF) have been proposed to complement the functional requirements of streaming applications, but without open-source implementation. In this paper, we present a reusable Apache NiFi dataflow that buffers tweets from multiple edge devices and performs anonymized sentiment analysis in real-time, using randomization. The solution can be easily adapted to suit different scenarios, enabling researchers to deploy custom anonymization algorithms.