Synthetic Data: Revisiting the Privacy-Utility Trade-off

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sarmin, Fatima Jahan, Sarkar, Atiquer Rahman, Wang, Yang, Mohammed, Noman
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Sarmin, Fatima Jahan
Sarkar, Atiquer Rahman
Wang, Yang
Mohammed, Noman
author_facet Sarmin, Fatima Jahan
Sarkar, Atiquer Rahman
Wang, Yang
Mohammed, Noman
contents Synthetic data has been considered a better privacy-preserving alternative to traditionally sanitized data across various applications. However, a recent article challenges this notion, stating that synthetic data does not provide a better trade-off between privacy and utility than traditional anonymization techniques, and that it leads to unpredictable utility loss and highly unpredictable privacy gain. The article also claims to have identified a breach in the differential privacy guarantees provided by PATE-GAN and PrivBayes. When a study claims to refute or invalidate prior findings, it is crucial to verify and validate the study. In our work, we analyzed the implementation of the privacy game described in the article and found that it operated in a highly specialized and constrained environment, which limits the applicability of its findings to general cases. Our exploration also revealed that the game did not satisfy a crucial precondition concerning data distributions, which contributed to the perceived violation of the differential privacy guarantees offered by PATE-GAN and PrivBayes. We also conducted a privacy-utility trade-off analysis in a more general and unconstrained environment. Our experimentation demonstrated that synthetic data indeed achieves a more favorable privacy-utility trade-off compared to the provided implementation of k-anonymization, thereby reaffirming earlier conclusions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthetic Data: Revisiting the Privacy-Utility Trade-off
Sarmin, Fatima Jahan
Sarkar, Atiquer Rahman
Wang, Yang
Mohammed, Noman
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Synthetic data has been considered a better privacy-preserving alternative to traditionally sanitized data across various applications. However, a recent article challenges this notion, stating that synthetic data does not provide a better trade-off between privacy and utility than traditional anonymization techniques, and that it leads to unpredictable utility loss and highly unpredictable privacy gain. The article also claims to have identified a breach in the differential privacy guarantees provided by PATE-GAN and PrivBayes. When a study claims to refute or invalidate prior findings, it is crucial to verify and validate the study. In our work, we analyzed the implementation of the privacy game described in the article and found that it operated in a highly specialized and constrained environment, which limits the applicability of its findings to general cases. Our exploration also revealed that the game did not satisfy a crucial precondition concerning data distributions, which contributed to the perceived violation of the differential privacy guarantees offered by PATE-GAN and PrivBayes. We also conducted a privacy-utility trade-off analysis in a more general and unconstrained environment. Our experimentation demonstrated that synthetic data indeed achieves a more favorable privacy-utility trade-off compared to the provided implementation of k-anonymization, thereby reaffirming earlier conclusions.
title Synthetic Data: Revisiting the Privacy-Utility Trade-off
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07926