Formal Privacy Models and Title 13: Publications

Economics and social science research often require analyzing datasets of sensitive personal information at fine granularity, with models fit to small subsets of the data. Unfortunately, such fine-grained analysis can easily reveal sensitive individual information. We study algorithms for simple linear regression that satisfy differential privacy, a constraint which guarantees that an algorithm's output reveals little about any individual input data record, even to an attacker with arbitrary side information about the dataset. We consider the design of differentially private algorithms for simple linear regression for small datasets, with tens to hundreds of datapoints, which is a particularly challenging regime for differential privacy. Focusing on a particular application to small-area analysis in economics research, we study the performance of a spectrum of algorithms we adapt to the setting. We identify key factors that affect their performance, showing through a range of experiments that algorithms based on robust estimators (in particular, the Theil-Sen estimator) perform well on the smallest datasets, but that other more standard algorithms do better as the dataset size increases.

Abstract

This article advocates a hybrid legal-technical approach to the evaluation of technical measures designed to render information anonymous in order to bring it outside the scope of data protection regulation. The article demonstrates how such an approach can be used for instantiating a key anonymization concept appearing in the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- singling out. The analysis identifies and addresses a tension between a common, compelling theory of singling out and a mathematical analysis of this theory, and it demonstrates how to make determinations regarding the sufficiency of specific technologies for satisfying regulatory requirements for anonymization.

Doubts about the feasibility of effective anonymization and de-identification have gained prominence in recent years in response to high-profile privacy breaches enabled by scientific advances in privacy research, improved analytical capabilities, the wider availability of personal data, and the unprecedented richness of available data sources. At the same time, privacy regulations recognize the possibility, at least in principle, of data anonymization that is sufficiently protective so as to free the resulting (anonymized) data from regulation. As a result, practitioners developing privacy enhancing technologies face substantial uncertainty as to the legal standing of these technologies. More fundamentally, it is not clear how to make a determination of compliance even when the tool is fully described and available for examination.

This gap is symptomatic of a more general problem: Legal and technical approaches to data protection have developed in parallel, and their conceptual underpinnings are growing increasingly divergent. When lawmakers rely on purely legal concepts to engage areas that are affected by rapid scientific and technological change, the resulting laws, when applied in practice, frequently create substantial uncertainty for implementation; provide contradictory recommendations in important cases; disagree with current scientific technical understanding; and fail to scale to the rapid pace of technological development. This article argues that new hybrid concepts, created through technical and legal co-design, can inform practices that are practically complete, coherent, and scalable.

As a case study, the article focuses on a key privacy-related concept appearing in Recital 26 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) called singling out. We identify a compelling theory of singling out that is implicit in the most persuasive guidance available, and demonstrate that the theory is ultimately incomplete. We then use that theory as the basis for a new and mathematically rigorous privacy concept called predicate singling-out. Predicate singling-out sheds light on the notion of singling out in the GDPR, itself inextricably linked to anonymization. We argue that any data protection tool that purports to anonymize arbitrary personal data under the GDPR must prevent predicate singling-out. This enables, for the first time, a legally- and mathematically-grounded analysis of the standing of supposed anonymization technologies like k-anonymity and differential privacy. The analysis in this article is backed by a technical-mathematical analysis previously published by two of the authors.

Conceptually, our analysis demonstrates that a nuanced understanding of baseline risk is unavoidable for a theory of singling out based on current regulatory guidance. Practically, it identifies previously unrecognized failures of anonymization. In particular, it demonstrates that some k-anonymous mechanisms may allow singling out, challenging the prevailing regulatory guidance.

The article concludes with a discussion of specific recommendations for both policymakers and scholars regarding how to conduct a hybrid legal-technical analysis. Rather than formalizing or mathematizing the law, the article provides approaches for wielding formal tools in the service of practical regulation.

 

 

There is a significant conceptual gap between legal and mathematical thinking around data privacy. The effect is uncertainty as to which technical offerings meet legal standards. This uncertainty is exacerbated by a litany of successful privacy attacks demonstrating that traditional statistical disclosure limitation techniques often fall short of the privacy envisioned by regulators. We define “predicate singling out,” a type of privacy attack intended to capture the concept of singling out appearing in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An adversary predicate singles out a dataset x using the output of a data-release mechanism M(x) if it finds a predicate p matching exactly one row in x with probability much better than a statistical baseline. A data-release mechanism that precludes such attacks is “secure against predicate singling out” (PSO secure). We argue that PSO security is a mathematical concept with legal consequences. Any data-release mechanism that purports to “render anonymous” personal data under the GDPR must prevent singling out and, hence, must be PSO secure. We analyze the properties of PSO security, showing that it fails to compose. Namely, a combination of more than logarithmically many exact counts, each individually PSO secure, facilitates predicate singling out. Finally, we ask whether differential privacy and k-anonymity are PSO secure. Leveraging a connection to statistical generalization, we show that differential privacy implies PSO security. However, and in contrast with current legal guidance, k-anonymity does not: There exists a simple predicate singling out attack under mild assumptions on the k-anonymizer and the data distribution.

A new line of work [6, 9, 15, 2] demonstrates how differential privacy [8] can be used as a mathematical tool for guaranteeing generalization in adaptive data analysis. Specifically, if a differentially private analysis is applied on a sample S of i.i.d. examples to select a lowsensitivity function f , then w.h.p. f (S) is close to its expectation, although f is being chosen based on the data. Very recently, Steinke and Ullman [16] observed that these generalization guarantees can be used for proving concentration bounds in the non-adaptive setting, where the low-sensitivity function is fixed beforehand. In particular, they obtain alternative proofs for classical concentration bounds for low-sensitivity functions, such as the Chernoff bound and McDiarmid’s Inequality. In this work, we set out to examine the situation for functions with high-sensitivity, for which differential privacy does not imply generalization guarantees under adaptive analysis. We show that differential privacy can be used to prove concentration bounds for such functions in the non-adaptive setting.

This document is a primer on differential privacy, which is a formal mathematical framework for guaranteeing privacy protection when analyzing or releasing statistical data. Recently emerging from the theoretical computer science literature, differential privacy is now in initial stages of implementation and use in various academic, industry, and government settings. Using intuitive illustrations and limited mathematical formalism, this document provides an introduction to differential privacy for non-technical practitioners, who are increasingly tasked with making decisions with respect to differential privacy as it grows more widespread in use. In particular, the examples in this document illustrate ways in which social scientists can conceptualize the guarantees provided by differential privacy with respect to the decisions they make when managing personal data about research subjects and informing them about the privacy protection they will be afforded. 

 

We study the problem of estimating finite sample confidence intervals of the mean of a normal population under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider both the known and unknown variance cases and construct differentially private algorithms to estimate confidence intervals. Crucially, our algorithms guarantee a finite sample coverage, as opposed to an asymptotic coverage. Unlike most previous differentially private algorithms, we do not require the domain of the samples to be bounded. We also prove lower bounds on the expected size of any differentially private confidence set showing that our the parameters are optimal up to polylogarithmic factors.

This position paper observes how different technical and normative conceptions of privacy have evolved in parallel and describes the practical challenges that these divergent approaches pose. Notably, past technologies relied on intuitive, heuristic understandings of privacy that have since been shown not to satisfy expectations for privacy protection. With computations ubiquitously integrated in almost every aspect of our lives, it is increasingly important to ensure that privacy technologies provide protection that is in line with relevant social norms and normative expectations. Similarly, it is also important to examine social norms and normative expectations with respect to the evolving scientific study of privacy. To this end, we argue for a rigorous analysis of the mapping from normative to technical concepts of privacy and vice versa. We review the landscape of normative and technical definitions of privacy and discuss specific examples of gaps between definitions that are relevant in the context of privacy in statistical computation. We then identify opportunities for overcoming their differences in the design of new approaches to protecting privacy in accordance with both technical and normative standards.