Raef Bassily, Kobbi Nissim, Adam Smith, Thomas Steinke, Uri Stemmer, and Jonathan Ullman. 2016. “
Algorithmic Stability for Adaptive Data Analysis.” 48th Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
arXiv VersionAbstractAdaptivity is an important feature of data analysis---the choice of questions to ask about a dataset often depends on previous interactions with the same dataset. However, statistical validity is typically studied in a nonadaptive model, where all questions are specified before the dataset is drawn. Recent work by Dwork et al. (STOC, 2015) and Hardt and Ullman (FOCS, 2014) initiated the formal study of this problem, and gave the first upper and lower bounds on the achievable generalization error for adaptive data analysis. Specifically, suppose there is an unknown distribution P and a set of n independent samples x is drawn from P. We seek an algorithm that, given x as input, accurately answers a sequence of adaptively chosen queries about the unknown distribution P. How many samples n must we draw from the distribution, as a function of the type of queries, the number of queries, and the desired level of accuracy? In this work we make two new contributions: (i) We give upper bounds on the number of samples n that are needed to answer statistical queries. The bounds improve and simplify the work of Dwork et al. (STOC, 2015), and have been applied in subsequent work by those authors (Science, 2015, NIPS, 2015). (ii) We prove the first upper bounds on the number of samples required to answer more general families of queries. These include arbitrary low-sensitivity queries and an important class of optimization queries. As in Dwork et al., our algorithms are based on a connection with algorithmic stability in the form of differential privacy. We extend their work by giving a quantitatively optimal, more general, and simpler proof of their main theorem that stability implies low generalization error. We also study weaker stability guarantees such as bounded KL divergence and total variation distance.
PDF Mark Bun and Thomas Steinke. 2016. “
Concentrated Differential Privacy: Simplifications, Extensions, and Lower Bounds.” 14th Theory of Cryptography Conference.
ArXiv VersionAbstract"Concentrated differential privacy" was recently introduced by Dwork and Rothblum as a relaxation of differential privacy, which permits sharper analyses of many privacy-preserving computations. We present an alternative formulation of the concept of concentrated differential privacy in terms of the Renyi divergence between the distributions obtained by running an algorithm on neighboring inputs. With this reformulation in hand, we prove sharper quantitative results, establish lower bounds, and raise a few new questions. We also unify this approach with approximate differential privacy by giving an appropriate definition of "approximate concentrated differential privacy."
PDF G. Barthe, P.Y. Strub, J. Hsu, A. D. Gordon, E. J. Gallego Arias, M. Gaboardi, and G. P. Farina. 2016. “
Differentially Private Bayesian Programming.” 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS.
p68-barthe.pdf Marco Gaboardi, Hyun woo Lim, Ryan Rogers, and Salil Vadhan. 2016. “
Differentially Private Chi-Squared Hypothesis Testing: Goodness of Fit and Independence Testing.” Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR .
Publisher's VersionAbstract
Hypothesis testing is a useful statistical tool in determining whether a given model should be rejected based on a sample from the population. Sample data may contain sensitive information about individuals, such as medical information. Thus it is important to design statistical tests that guarantee the privacy of subjects in the data. In this work, we study hypothesis testing subject to differential privacy, specifically chi-squared tests for goodness of fit for multinomial data and independence between two categorical variables.
We propose new tests for goodness of fit and independence testing that like the classical versions can be used to determine whether a given model should be rejected or not, and that additionally can ensure differential privacy. We give both Monte Carlo based hypothesis tests as well as hypothesis tests that more closely follow the classical chi-squared goodness of fit test and the Pearson chi-squared test for independence. Crucially, our tests account for the distribution of the noise that is injected to ensure privacy in determining significance.
We show that these tests can be used to achieve desired significance levels, in sharp contrast to direct applications of classical tests to differentially private contingency tables which can result in wildly varying significance levels. Moreover, we study the statistical power of these tests. We empirically show that to achieve the same level of power as the classical non-private tests our new tests need only a relatively modest increase in sample size.
PDF Effy Vayena, Urs Gasser, Alexandra Wood, David R. O'Brien, and Micah Altman. 2016. “
Elements of a New Ethical Framework for Big Data Research.” Washington and Lee Law Review, 72, 3.
Publisher's VersionAbstractmerging large-scale data sources hold tremendous potential for new scientific research into human biology, behaviors, and relationships. At the same time, big data research presents privacy and ethical challenges that the current regulatory framework is ill-suited to address. In light of the immense value of large-scale research data, the central question moving forward is not whether such data should be made available for research, but rather how the benefits can be captured in a way that respects fundamental principles of ethics and privacy.
In response, this Essay outlines elements of a new ethical framework for big data research. It argues that oversight should aim to provide universal coverage of human subjects research, regardless of funding source, across all stages of the information lifecycle. New definitions and standards should be developed based on a modern understanding of privacy science and the expectations of research subjects. In addition, researchers and review boards should be encouraged to incorporate systematic risk-benefit assessments and new procedural and technological solutions from the wide range of interventions that are available. Finally, oversight mechanisms and the safeguards implemented should be tailored to the intended uses, benefits, threats, harms, and vulnerabilities associated with a specific research activity.
Development of a new ethical framework with these elements should be the product of a dynamic multistakeholder process that is designed to capture the latest scientific understanding of privacy, analytical methods, available safeguards, community and social norms, and best practices for research ethics as they evolve over time. Such a framework would support big data utilization and help harness the value of big data in a sustainable and trust-building manner.
PDF Kobbi Nissim, Uri Stemmer, and Salil Vadhan. 2016. “
Locating a Small Cluster Privately.” In PODS 2016. ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference, San Francisco, USA, 2016.
Abstract
We present a new algorithm for locating a small cluster of points with differential privacy [Dwork, McSherry, Nissim,and Smith, 2006]. Our algorithm has implications to private data exploration, clustering, and removal of outliers. Furthermore, we use it to significantly relax the requirements of the sample and aggregate technique [Nissim, Raskhodnikova,and Smith, 2007], which allows compiling of "off the shelf" (non-private) analyses into analyses that preserve differential privacy.
PDF Mark Bun and Mark Zhandry. 2016. “
Order revealing encryption and the hardness of private learning.” In Proceedings of the 12th Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2016). Tel-Aviv, Israel.
AbstractAn order-revealing encryption scheme gives a public procedure by which two ciphertexts can be compared to reveal the ordering of their underlying plaintexts. We show how to use order-revealing encryption to separate computationally efficient PAC learning from efficient (ϵ,δ)-differentially private PAC learning. That is, we construct a concept class that is efficiently PAC learnable, but for which every efficient learner fails to be differentially private. This answers a question of Kasiviswanathan et al. (FOCS '08, SIAM J. Comput. '11).
To prove our result, we give a generic transformation from an order-revealing encryption scheme into one with strongly correct comparison, which enables the consistent comparison of ciphertexts that are not obtained as the valid encryption of any message. We believe this construction may be of independent interest.
ArXiv PDF Micah Altman, Alexandra Wood, David R. O'Brien, and Urs Gasser. 2016. “
Practical Approaches to Big Data Privacy Over Time.” Brussels Privacy Symposium.
AbstractIncreasingly, governments and businesses are collecting, analyzing, and sharing detailed information about individuals over long periods of time. Vast quantities of data from new sources and novel methods for large-scale data analysis promise to yield deeper understanding of human characteristics, behavior, and relationships and advance the state of science, public policy, and innovation. At the same time, the collection and use of fine-grained personal data over time is associated with significant risks to individuals, groups, and society at large. In this article, we examine a range of longterm data collections, conducted by researchers in social science, in order to identify the characteristics of these programs that drive their unique sets of risks and benefits. We also examine the practices that have been established by social scientists to protect the privacy of data subjects in light of the challenges presented in long-term studies. We argue that many uses of big data, across academic, government, and industry settings, have characteristics similar to those of traditional long-term research studies. In this article, we discuss the lessons that can be learned from longstanding data management practices in research and potentially applied in the context of newly emerging data sources and uses.
PDF Ryan Rogers, Aaron Roth, Jonathan Ullman, and Salil Vadhan. 2016. “
Privacy Odometers and Filters: Pay-as-you-Go Composition.” Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).
AbstractIn this paper we initiate the study of adaptive composition in differential privacy when the length of the composition, and the privacy parameters themselves can be chosen adaptively, as a function of the outcome of previously run analyses. This case is much more delicate than the setting covered by existing composition theorems, in which the algorithms themselves can be chosen adaptively, but the privacy parameters must be fixed up front. Indeed, it isn't even clear how to define differential privacy in the adaptive parameter setting. We proceed by defining two objects which cover the two main use cases of composition theorems. A privacy filter is a stopping time rule that allows an analyst to halt a computation before his pre-specified privacy budget is exceeded. A privacy odometer allows the analyst to track realized privacy loss as he goes, without needing to pre-specify a privacy budget. We show that unlike the case in which privacy parameters are fixed, in the adaptive parameter setting, these two use cases are distinct. We show that there exist privacy filters with bounds comparable (up to constants) with existing privacy composition theorems. We also give a privacy odometer that nearly matches non-adaptive private composition theorems, but is sometimes worse by a small asymptotic factor. Moreover, we show that this is inherent, and that any valid privacy odometer in the adaptive parameter setting must lose this factor, which shows a formal separation between the filter and odometer use-cases.
ArXiv PDF Myrto Arapinis, Diego Figueira, and Marco Gaboardi. 2016. “
Sensitivity of Counting Queries.” 43rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming.
AbstractIn the context of statistical databases, the release of accurate statistical information about the collected data often puts at risk the privacy of the individual contributors. The goal of differential privacy is to maximize the utility of a query while protecting the individual records in the database. A natural way to achieve differential privacy is to add statistical noise to the result of the query. In this context, a mechanism for releasing statistical information is thus a trade-off between utility and privacy. In order to balance these two "conflicting" requirements, privacy preserving mechanisms calibrate the added noise to the so-called sensitivity of the query, and thus a precise estimate of the sensitivity of the query is necessary to determine the amplitude of the noise to be added. In this paper, we initiate a systematic study of sensitivity of counting queries over relational databases. We first observe that the sensitivity of a Relational Algebra query with counting is not computable in general, and that while the sensitivity of Conjunctive Queries with counting is computable, it becomes unbounded as soon as the query includes a join. We then consider restricted classes of databases (databases with constraints), and study the problem of computing the sensitivity of a query given such constraints. We are able to establish bounds on the sensitivity of counting conjunctive queries over constrained databases. The kind of constraints studied here are: functional dependencies and cardinality dependencies. The latter is a natural generalization of functional dependencies that allows us to provide tight bounds on the sensitivity of counting conjunctive queries.
PDF Mark Bun, Yi Hsiu Chen, and Salil Vadhan. 2016. “
Separating Computational and Statistical Differential Privacy in the Client-Server Model.” Proceedings of the 14th Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2016-B).
AbstractDifferential privacy is a mathematical definition of privacy for statistical data analysis. It guarantees that any (possibly adversarial) data analyst is unable to learn too much information that is specific to an individual. Mironov et al. (CRYPTO 2009) proposed several computational relaxations of differential privacy (CDP), which relax this guarantee to hold only against computationally bounded adversaries. Their work and subsequent work showed that CDP can yield substantial accuracy improvements in various multiparty privacy problems. However, these works left open whether such improvements are possible in the traditional client-server model of data analysis. In fact, Groce, Katz and Yerukhimovich (TCC 2011) showed that, in this setting, it is impossible to take advantage of CDP for many natural statistical tasks. Our main result shows that, assuming the existence of sub-exponentially secure one-way functions and 2-message witness indistinguishable proofs (zaps) for NP, that there is in fact a computational task in the client-server model that can be efficiently performed with CDP, but is infeasible to perform with information-theoretic differential privacy.
PDF Micah Altman, Alexandra Wood, David O'Brien, Salil Vadhan, and Urs Gasser. 2016. “
Towards a Modern Approach to Privacy-Aware Government Data Releases.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 30, 3.
Abstract
This article summarizes research exploring various models by which governments release data to the public and the interventions in place to protect the privacy of individuals in the data. Applying concepts from the recent scientific and legal literature on privacy, the authors propose a framework for a modern privacy analysis and illustrate how governments can use the framework to select appropriate privacy controls that are calibrated to the specific benefits and risks in individual data releases.
PDF