English

Selling Data at an Auction under Privacy Constraints

Computer Science and Game Theory 2020-05-20 v1

Abstract

Private data query combines mechanism design with privacy protection to produce aggregated statistics from privately-owned data records. The problem arises in a data marketplace where data owners have personalised privacy requirements and private data valuations. We focus on the case when the data owners are single-minded, i.e., they are willing to release their data only if the data broker guarantees to meet their announced privacy requirements. For a data broker who wants to purchase data from such data owners, we propose the SingleMindedQuery (SMQ) mechanism, which uses a reverse auction to select data owners and determine compensations. SMQ satisfies interim incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and budget feasibility. Moreover, it uses purchased privacy expectation maximisation as a principle to produce accurate outputs for commonly-used queries such as counting, median and linear predictor. The effectiveness of our method is empirically validated by a series of experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.09248,
  title  = {Selling Data at an Auction under Privacy Constraints},
  author = {Mengxiao Zhang and Fernando Beltran and Jiamou Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.09248},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:39:04.581Z