Are Data Experts Buying into Differentially Private Synthetic Data? Gathering Community Perspectives

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rosenblatt, Lucas, Howe, Bill, Stoyanovich, Julia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Rosenblatt, Lucas
Howe, Bill
Stoyanovich, Julia
author_facet Rosenblatt, Lucas
Howe, Bill
Stoyanovich, Julia
contents Data privacy is a core tenet of responsible computing, and in the United States, differential privacy (DP) is the dominant technical operationalization of privacy-preserving data analysis. With this study, we qualitatively examine one class of DP mechanisms: private data synthesizers. To that end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with data experts: academics and practitioners who regularly work with data. Broadly, our findings suggest that quantitative DP benchmarks must be grounded in practitioner needs, while communication challenges persist. Participants expressed a need for context-aware DP solutions, focusing on parity between research outcomes on real and synthetic data. Our analysis led to three recommendations: (1) improve existing insufficient sanitized benchmarks; successful DP implementations require well-documented, partner-vetted use cases, (2) organizations using DP synthetic data should publish discipline-specific standards of evidence, and (3) tiered data access models could allow researchers to gradually access sensitive data based on demonstrated competence with high-privacy, low-fidelity synthetic data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_13030
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Data Experts Buying into Differentially Private Synthetic Data? Gathering Community Perspectives
Rosenblatt, Lucas
Howe, Bill
Stoyanovich, Julia
Human-Computer Interaction
Cryptography and Security
Databases
Data privacy is a core tenet of responsible computing, and in the United States, differential privacy (DP) is the dominant technical operationalization of privacy-preserving data analysis. With this study, we qualitatively examine one class of DP mechanisms: private data synthesizers. To that end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with data experts: academics and practitioners who regularly work with data. Broadly, our findings suggest that quantitative DP benchmarks must be grounded in practitioner needs, while communication challenges persist. Participants expressed a need for context-aware DP solutions, focusing on parity between research outcomes on real and synthetic data. Our analysis led to three recommendations: (1) improve existing insufficient sanitized benchmarks; successful DP implementations require well-documented, partner-vetted use cases, (2) organizations using DP synthetic data should publish discipline-specific standards of evidence, and (3) tiered data access models could allow researchers to gradually access sensitive data based on demonstrated competence with high-privacy, low-fidelity synthetic data.
title Are Data Experts Buying into Differentially Private Synthetic Data? Gathering Community Perspectives
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Cryptography and Security
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13030