Slowly Scaling Per-Record Differential Privacy

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Finley, Brian, Caruso, Anthony M, Doty, Justin C, Machanavajjhala, Ashwin, Meyer, Mikaela R, Pujol, David, Sexton, William, Terner, Zachary
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Finley, Brian
Caruso, Anthony M
Doty, Justin C
Machanavajjhala, Ashwin
Meyer, Mikaela R
Pujol, David
Sexton, William
Terner, Zachary
author_facet Finley, Brian
Caruso, Anthony M
Doty, Justin C
Machanavajjhala, Ashwin
Meyer, Mikaela R
Pujol, David
Sexton, William
Terner, Zachary
contents We develop formal privacy mechanisms for releasing statistics from data with many outlying values, such as income data. These mechanisms ensure that a per-record differential privacy guarantee degrades slowly in the protected records' influence on the statistics being released. Formal privacy mechanisms generally add randomness, or "noise," to published statistics. If a noisy statistic's distribution changes little with the addition or deletion of a single record in the underlying dataset, an attacker looking at this statistic will find it plausible that any particular record was present or absent, preserving the records' privacy. More influential records -- those whose addition or deletion would change the statistics' distribution more -- typically suffer greater privacy loss. The per-record differential privacy framework quantifies these record-specific privacy guarantees, but existing mechanisms let these guarantees degrade rapidly (linearly or quadratically) with influence. While this may be acceptable in cases with some moderately influential records, it results in unacceptably high privacy losses when records' influence varies widely, as is common in economic data. We develop mechanisms with privacy guarantees that instead degrade as slowly as logarithmically with influence. These mechanisms allow for the accurate, unbiased release of statistics, while providing meaningful protection for highly influential records. As an example, we consider the private release of sums of unbounded establishment data such as payroll, where our mechanisms extend meaningful privacy protection even to very large establishments. We evaluate these mechanisms empirically and demonstrate their utility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_18118
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Slowly Scaling Per-Record Differential Privacy
Finley, Brian
Caruso, Anthony M
Doty, Justin C
Machanavajjhala, Ashwin
Meyer, Mikaela R
Pujol, David
Sexton, William
Terner, Zachary
Cryptography and Security
Methodology
We develop formal privacy mechanisms for releasing statistics from data with many outlying values, such as income data. These mechanisms ensure that a per-record differential privacy guarantee degrades slowly in the protected records' influence on the statistics being released. Formal privacy mechanisms generally add randomness, or "noise," to published statistics. If a noisy statistic's distribution changes little with the addition or deletion of a single record in the underlying dataset, an attacker looking at this statistic will find it plausible that any particular record was present or absent, preserving the records' privacy. More influential records -- those whose addition or deletion would change the statistics' distribution more -- typically suffer greater privacy loss. The per-record differential privacy framework quantifies these record-specific privacy guarantees, but existing mechanisms let these guarantees degrade rapidly (linearly or quadratically) with influence. While this may be acceptable in cases with some moderately influential records, it results in unacceptably high privacy losses when records' influence varies widely, as is common in economic data. We develop mechanisms with privacy guarantees that instead degrade as slowly as logarithmically with influence. These mechanisms allow for the accurate, unbiased release of statistics, while providing meaningful protection for highly influential records. As an example, we consider the private release of sums of unbounded establishment data such as payroll, where our mechanisms extend meaningful privacy protection even to very large establishments. We evaluate these mechanisms empirically and demonstrate their utility.
title Slowly Scaling Per-Record Differential Privacy
topic Cryptography and Security
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18118