The rapid evolution of the web has changed the way information is created, distributed, evaluated and consumed. Users are now at the center of the web and becoming the most prolific content generators. To effectively navigate through the stream of available news, users require tools to efficiently filter the content according to their interests. To receive personalized content, users exploit social networks and recommendation systems using their private data. However, these systems face scalability issues, have difficulties in coping with interest dynamics, and raise a multitude of privacy challenges. In this thesis, we exploit peer-to-peer networks to propose a recommendation system to disseminate news in a personalized manner. Peer-to-peer approaches provide highly-scalable systems and are an interesting alternative to Big brother type companies. However, the absence of any global knowledge calls for collaborative filtering schemes that can cope with partial and dynamic interest profiles. Furthermore, the collaborative filtering schemes must not hurt the privacy of users. The first contribution of this thesis conveys the feasibility of a fully decentralized news recommender. The proposed system constructs an implicit social network based on user profiles that express the opinions of users about the news items they receive. News items are disseminated through a heterogeneous gossip protocol that (1) biases the orientation of the dissemination, and (2) amplifies dissemination based on the level of interest in each news item. Then, we propose obfuscation mechanisms to preserve privacy without sacrificing the quality of the recommendation. Finally, we explore a novel scheme leveraging the power of the distribution in a centralized architecture. This hybrid and generic scheme democratizes personalized systems by providing an online, cost-effective and scalable architecture for content providers at a minimal investment cost.
