Publications

Increasingly, 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.

In 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.

In 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.

Differential 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.

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.

Significant progress has been made recently on theoretical analysis of estimators for the stochastic block model (SBM). In this paper, we consider the multi-graph SBM, which serves as a foundation for many application settings including dynamic and multi-layer networks. We explore the asymptotic properties of two estimators for the multi-graph SBM, namely spectral clustering and the maximum-likelihood estimate (MLE), as the number of layers of the multi-graph increases. We derive sufficient conditions for consistency of both estimators and propose a variational approximation to the MLE that is computationally feasible for large networks. We verify the sufficient conditions via simulation and demonstrate that they are practical. In addition, we apply the model to two real data sets: a dynamic social network and a multi-layer social network with several types of relations.

The vast majority of social science research uses small (megabyte- or gigabyte-scale) datasets. These fixed-scale datasets are commonly downloaded to the researcher’s computer where the analysis is performed. The data can be shared, archived, and cited with well-established technologies, such as the Dataverse Project, to support the published results. The trend toward big data—including large-scale streaming data—is starting to transform research and has the potential to impact policymaking as well as our understanding of the social, economic, and political problems that affect human societies. However, big data research poses new challenges to the execution of the analysis, archiving and reuse of the data, and reproduction of the results. Downloading these datasets to a researcher’s computer is impractical, leading to analyses taking place in the cloud, and requiring unusual expertise, collaboration, and tool development. The increased amount of information in these large datasets is an advantage, but at the same time it poses an increased risk of revealing personally identifiable sensitive information. In this article, we discuss solutions to these new challenges so that the social sciences can realize the potential of big data.

This essay first appeared in the Internet Monitor project’s second annual report, Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World. The report, published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.

We prove new upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of (ϵ,δ) differentially private algorithms for releasing approximate answers to threshold functions. A threshold function cx over a totally ordered domain X evaluates to cx(y)=1 if y≤x, and evaluates to 0 otherwise. We give the first nontrivial lower bound for releasing thresholds with (ϵ,δ) differential privacy, showing that the task is impossible over an infinite domain X, and moreover requires sample complexity n≥Ω(log∗|X|), which grows with the size of the domain. Inspired by the techniques used to prove this lower bound, we give an algorithm for releasing thresholds with n≤2(1+o(1))log∗|X| samples. This improves the previous best upper bound of 8(1+o(1))log∗|X| (Beimel et al., RANDOM '13).
Our sample complexity upper and lower bounds also apply to the tasks of learning distributions with respect to Kolmogorov distance and of properly PAC learning thresholds with differential privacy. The lower bound gives the first separation between the sample complexity of properly learning a concept class with (ϵ,δ) differential privacy and learning without privacy. For properly learning thresholds in ℓ dimensions, this lower bound extends to n≥Ω(ℓ⋅log∗|X|).
To obtain our results, we give reductions in both directions from releasing and properly learning thresholds and the simpler interior point problem. Given a database D of elements from X, the interior point problem asks for an element between the smallest and largest elements in D. We introduce new recursive constructions for bounding the sample complexity of the interior point problem, as well as further reductions and techniques for proving impossibility results for other basic problems in differential privacy.

In a search task, a group of agents compete to be the first to find the solution. Each agent has different private information to incorporate into its search. This problem is inspired by settings such as scientific research, Bitcoin hash inversion, or hunting for some buried treasure. A social planner such as a funding agency, mining pool, or pirate captain might like to convince the agents to collaborate, share their information, and greatly reduce the cost of searching. However, this cooperation is in tension with the individuals' competitive desire to each be the first to win the search. The planner's proposal should incentivize truthful information sharing, reduce the total cost of searching, and satisfy fairness properties that preserve the spirit of the competition. We design contract-based mechanisms for information sharing without money. The planner solicits the agents' information and assigns search locations to the agents, who may then search only within their assignments. Truthful reporting of information to the mechanism maximizes an agent's chance to win the search. Epsilon-voluntary participation is satisfied for large search spaces. In order to formalize the planner's goals of fairness and reduced search cost, we propose a simplified, simulated game as a benchmark and quantify fairness and search cost relative to this benchmark scenario. The game is also used to implement our mechanisms. Finally, we extend to the case where coalitions of agents may participate in the mechanism, forming larger coalitions recursively.

A new line of work, started with Dwork et al., studies the task of answering statistical queries using a sample and relates the problem to the concept of differential privacy. By the Hoeffding bound, a sample of size O(logk/α2) suffices to answer k non-adaptive queries within error α, where the answers are computed by evaluating the statistical queries on the sample. This argument fails when the queries are chosen adaptively (and can hence depend on the sample). Dwork et al. showed that if the answers are computed with (ϵ,δ)-differential privacy then O(ϵ) accuracy is guaranteed with probability 1−O(δϵ). Using the Private Multiplicative Weights mechanism, they concluded that the sample size can still grow polylogarithmically with the k.
Very recently, Bassily et al. presented an improved bound and showed that (a variant of) the private multiplicative weights algorithm can answer k adaptively chosen statistical queries using sample complexity that grows logarithmically in k. However, their results no longer hold for every differentially private algorithm, and require modifying the private multiplicative weights algorithm in order to obtain their high probability bounds.
We greatly simplify the results of Dwork et al. and improve on the bound by showing that differential privacy guarantees O(ϵ) accuracy with probability 1−O(δlog(1/ϵ)/ϵ). It would be tempting to guess that an (ϵ,δ)-differentially private computation should guarantee O(ϵ) accuracy with probability 1−O(δ). However, we show that this is not the case, and that our bound is tight (up to logarithmic factors).