English

Integrating Differential Privacy and Contextual Integrity

Cryptography and Security 2024-01-30 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

In this work, we propose the first framework for integrating Differential Privacy (DP) and Contextual Integrity (CI). DP is a property of an algorithm that injects statistical noise to obscure information about individuals represented within a database. CI defines privacy as information flow that is appropriate to social context. Analyzed together, these paradigms outline two dimensions on which to analyze privacy of information flows: descriptive and normative properties. We show that our new integrated framework provides benefits to both CI and DP that cannot be attained when each definition is considered in isolation: it enables contextually-guided tuning of the epsilon parameter in DP, and it enables CI to be applied to a broader set of information flows occurring in real-world systems, such as those involving PETs and machine learning. We conclude with a case study based on the use of DP in the U.S. Census Bureau.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.15774,
  title  = {Integrating Differential Privacy and Contextual Integrity},
  author = {Sebastian Benthall and Rachel Cummings},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.15774},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Published in Proceedings of 3rd ACM Computer Science And Law Symposium, 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:29:33.578Z