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Differential Privacy (DP) has emerged as a pivotal approach for safeguarding individual privacy in data analysis, yet its practical adoption is often hindered by challenges in the implementation and communication of DP. This paper presents a comprehensive systematization of existing research studies around the usability of DP, synthesizing insights from studies on both the practical use of DP tools and strategies for conveying DP parameters that determine privacy protection levels, such as epsilon. By reviewing and analyzing these studies, we identify core usability challenges, best practices, and critical gaps in current DP tools that affect adoption across diverse user groups, including developers, data analysts, and non-technical stakeholders. Our analysis highlights actionable insights and pathways for future research that emphasizes user-centered design and clear communication, fostering the development of more accessible DP tools that meet practical needs and support broader adoption.
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Advancing Differential Privacy: Where We Are Now and Future Directions for Real-World Deployment
In this article, we present a detailed review of current practices and state-of-the-art methodologies in the field of differential privacy (DP), with a focus of advancing DP’s deployment in real-world applications. Key points and high-level contents of the article were originated from the discussions from “Differential Privacy (DP): Challenges Towards the Next Frontier,” a workshop held in July 2022 with experts from industry, academia, and the public sector seeking answers to broad questions pertaining to privacy and its implications in the design of industry-grade systems.This article aims to provide a reference point for the algorithmic and design decisions within the realm of privacy, highlighting important challenges and potential research directions. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, this article delves into the infrastructure needs for designing private systems, methods for achieving better privacy/utility trade-offs, performing privacy attacks and auditing, as well as communicating privacy with broader audiences and stakeholders.
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- PAR ID:
- 10490868
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Harvard Data Science Review
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Harvard data science review
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2644-2353
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- differential privacy, privacy infrastructure, utility trade-offs, privacy protection
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Differential privacy has seen remarkable success as a rigorous and practical formalization of data privacy in the past decade. This privacy definition and its divergence based relaxations, however, have several acknowledged weaknesses, either in handling composition of private algorithms or in analyzing important primitives like privacy amplification by subsampling. Inspired by the hypothesis testing formulation of privacy, this paper proposes a new relaxation, which we term `f-differential privacy' (f-DP). This notion of privacy has a number of appealing properties and, in particular, avoids difficulties associated with divergence based relaxations. First, f-DP preserves the hypothesis testing interpretation. In addition, f-DP allows for lossless reasoning about composition in an algebraic fashion. Moreover, we provide a powerful technique to import existing results proven for original DP to f-DP and, as an application, obtain a simple subsampling theorem for f-DP. In addition to the above findings, we introduce a canonical single-parameter family of privacy notions within the f-DP class that is referred to as `Gaussian differential privacy' (GDP), defined based on testing two shifted Gaussians. GDP is focal among the f-DP class because of a central limit theorem we prove. More precisely, the privacy guarantees of \emph{any} hypothesis testing based definition of privacy (including original DP) converges to GDP in the limit under composition. The CLT also yields a computationally inexpensive tool for analyzing the exact composition of private algorithms. Taken together, this collection of attractive properties render f-DP a mathematically coherent, analytically tractable, and versatile framework for private data analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the use of the tools we develop by giving an improved privacy analysis of noisy stochastic gradient descent.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.d3197524
