Abstract. Full-text article available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2019.07.036In the recent past, deep learning has received remarkable acceptance in real-world applications. Social computing expands the existing notion of cyber space and physical space to a more advance cyber–physical–social system (CPSS). Therefore, deep learning provides a propitious technique for accurate mining of information from CPSS, thus facilitates CPSS to offer services of exceptional quality efficiently. However, most of the current deep learning methods are struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing heterogeneous and highly nonlinear dissemination of data. Furthermore, the advancement of deep learning presents privacy concerns. This article proposes a deep private tensor autoencoder (dPTAE), where tensors are used for data representation, and differential privacy guarantees strong privacy. The core idea of our work is to enforce differential privacy through noise injection into the objective functions instead of the results they produce. In addition, the proposed method preserves the privacy of information shared amongst CPSS in smart environments. We applied dPTAE on three representative data sets. Rigorous experimental evaluations and theoretical analysis demonstrate that dPTAE is significantly effective and efficient.