A Tight Context-aware Privacy Bound for Histogram Publication

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Saeidian, Sara, Yavuzyılmaz, Ata, Grosse, Leonhard, Schuppe, Georg, Oechtering, Tobias J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Saeidian, Sara
Yavuzyılmaz, Ata
Grosse, Leonhard
Schuppe, Georg
Oechtering, Tobias J.
author_facet Saeidian, Sara
Yavuzyılmaz, Ata
Grosse, Leonhard
Schuppe, Georg
Oechtering, Tobias J.
contents We analyze the privacy guarantees of the Laplace mechanism releasing the histogram of a dataset through the lens of pointwise maximal leakage (PML). While differential privacy is commonly used to quantify the privacy loss, it is a context-free definition that does not depend on the data distribution. In contrast, PML enables a more refined analysis by incorporating assumptions about the data distribution. We show that when the probability of each histogram bin is bounded away from zero, stronger privacy protection can be achieved for a fixed level of noise. Our results demonstrate the advantage of context-aware privacy measures and show that incorporating assumptions about the data can improve privacy-utility tradeoffs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18832
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Tight Context-aware Privacy Bound for Histogram Publication
Saeidian, Sara
Yavuzyılmaz, Ata
Grosse, Leonhard
Schuppe, Georg
Oechtering, Tobias J.
Cryptography and Security
Information Theory
We analyze the privacy guarantees of the Laplace mechanism releasing the histogram of a dataset through the lens of pointwise maximal leakage (PML). While differential privacy is commonly used to quantify the privacy loss, it is a context-free definition that does not depend on the data distribution. In contrast, PML enables a more refined analysis by incorporating assumptions about the data distribution. We show that when the probability of each histogram bin is bounded away from zero, stronger privacy protection can be achieved for a fixed level of noise. Our results demonstrate the advantage of context-aware privacy measures and show that incorporating assumptions about the data can improve privacy-utility tradeoffs.
title A Tight Context-aware Privacy Bound for Histogram Publication
topic Cryptography and Security
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18832