On Sat, 29 Jan 2022 at 07:44, Darius Runge <darius-runge@magenta.de> wrote:

Dear all,

I started using WikiData for Private Information Retrieval. This allows answering certain questions while maintaining a high degree of secrecy. Suppose you wanted to know when Einstein was born, but for some reason you must keep the fact that you want to know this a secret. In this case, we assume a threat model with perfect knowledge about the computer in use, not just that someone managed to log the Wikidata requests.

One solution would be to request a table of every human who ever won the Nobel Prize (this requires the common knowledge of Einstein being a winner of said) with the kind of Nobel Prize, date awarded, date of birth, date of death unless living, nationality etc. If we let this table scroll across the screen and read the required entry, there would be - as far as I can tell - no way to learn which entry (and how many of them) is of our interest.

I have written a simple PHP script that allows one to enter a SPARQL request and have it displayed as a scrolling table. Please be advised that this is in a very informal alpha state, and I am no professional Web Developer. It's a mere proof-of-concept, but feel free to try it out if the API quota lets you.

https://darius-runge.eu/otp/request.php

My question is, whether anyone of you might be interested in working with me on discussing practical implications of this method (how should requests be written to allow for the desired privacy?) or even making a better implementation of a tool that allows viewing the scrolling table of printing it out.

Feel free to reply to this mailing list entry or contact me privately with the postal or telecommunication data provided in the footer in case you don't want to discuss it in public.

Best,
Darius

This is interesting. Both privacy and wikidata service load concerns may be addressed best by the various efforts underway towards making it easier to run clones of the wikidata dataset in a variety of environments - cloud platforms, local machines, etc.

Eg https://addshore.com/2019/10/your-own-wikidata-query-service-with-no-limits/

Dan

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