Graph embedding generation techniques aim to learn low-dimensional vectors
for each node in a graph and have recently gained increasing research
attention. Publishing low-dimensional node vectors enables various graph
analysis tasks, such as structural equivalence and link prediction. Yet,
improper publication opens a backdoor to malicious attackers, who can infer
sensitive information of individuals from the low-dimensional node vectors.
Existing methods tackle this issue by developing deep graph learning models
with differential privacy (DP). However, they often suffer from large noise
injections and cannot provide structural preferences consistent with mining
objectives. Recently, skip-gram based graph embedding generation techniques are
widely used due to their ability to extract customizable structures. Based on
skip-gram, we present SE-PrivGEmb, a structure-preference enabled graph
embedding generation under DP. For arbitrary structure preferences, we design a
unified noise tolerance mechanism via perturbing non-zero vectors. This
mechanism mitigates utility degradation caused by high sensitivity. By
carefully designing negative sampling probabilities in skip-gram, we
theoretically demonstrate that skip-gram can preserve arbitrary proximities,
which quantify structural features in graphs. Extensive experiments show that
our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under structural
equivalence and link prediction tasks.