Practitioners' Perspectives on a Differential Privacy Deployment Registry

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nanayakkara, Priyanka, Ghazi, Elena, Vadhan, Salil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nanayakkara, Priyanka
Ghazi, Elena
Vadhan, Salil
author_facet Nanayakkara, Priyanka
Ghazi, Elena
Vadhan, Salil
contents Differential privacy (DP) -- a principled approach to producing statistical data products with strong, mathematically provable privacy guarantees for the individuals in the underlying dataset -- has seen substantial adoption in practice over the past decade. Applying DP requires making several implementation decisions, each with significant impacts on data privacy and/or utility. Hence, to promote shared learning and accountability around DP deployments, Dwork, Kohli, and Mulligan (2019) proposed a public-facing repository ("registry") of DP deployments. The DP community has recently started to work toward realizing this vision. We contribute to this effort by (1) developing a holistic, hierarchical schema to describe any given DP deployment and (2) designing and implementing an interactive interface to act as a registry where practitioners can access information about past DP deployments. We (3) populate our interface with 21 real-world DP deployments and (4) conduct an exploratory user study with DP practitioners ($n=16$) to understand how they would use the registry, as well as what challenges and opportunities they foresee around its adoption. We find that participants were enthusiastic about the registry as a valuable resource for evaluating prior deployments and making future deployments. They also identified several opportunities for the registry, including that it can become a "hub" for the community and support broader communication around DP (e.g., to legal teams). At the same time, they identified challenges around the registry gaining adoption, including the effort and risk involved with making implementation choices public and moderating the quality of entries. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for encouraging adoption and increasing the registry's value not only to DP practitioners, but also to policymakers, data users, and data subjects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13509
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Practitioners' Perspectives on a Differential Privacy Deployment Registry
Nanayakkara, Priyanka
Ghazi, Elena
Vadhan, Salil
Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Differential privacy (DP) -- a principled approach to producing statistical data products with strong, mathematically provable privacy guarantees for the individuals in the underlying dataset -- has seen substantial adoption in practice over the past decade. Applying DP requires making several implementation decisions, each with significant impacts on data privacy and/or utility. Hence, to promote shared learning and accountability around DP deployments, Dwork, Kohli, and Mulligan (2019) proposed a public-facing repository ("registry") of DP deployments. The DP community has recently started to work toward realizing this vision. We contribute to this effort by (1) developing a holistic, hierarchical schema to describe any given DP deployment and (2) designing and implementing an interactive interface to act as a registry where practitioners can access information about past DP deployments. We (3) populate our interface with 21 real-world DP deployments and (4) conduct an exploratory user study with DP practitioners ($n=16$) to understand how they would use the registry, as well as what challenges and opportunities they foresee around its adoption. We find that participants were enthusiastic about the registry as a valuable resource for evaluating prior deployments and making future deployments. They also identified several opportunities for the registry, including that it can become a "hub" for the community and support broader communication around DP (e.g., to legal teams). At the same time, they identified challenges around the registry gaining adoption, including the effort and risk involved with making implementation choices public and moderating the quality of entries. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for encouraging adoption and increasing the registry's value not only to DP practitioners, but also to policymakers, data users, and data subjects.
title Practitioners' Perspectives on a Differential Privacy Deployment Registry
topic Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13509