Related papers: Participation Cost Estimation: Private Versus Non-…
In some socio-economic surveys, data are collected on sensitive or stigmatizing issues such as tax evasion, criminal conviction, drug use, etc. In such surveys, direct questioning of respondents is not of much use and the randomized…
Location entropy (LE) is a popular metric for measuring the popularity of various locations (e.g., points-of-interest). Unlike other metrics computed from only the number of (unique) visits to a location, namely frequency, LE also captures…
Privacy personas capture the differences in user segments with respect to one's knowledge, behavioural patterns, level of self-efficacy, and perception of the importance of privacy protection. Modelling these differences is essential for…
Data generated by users on digital platforms are a crucial resource for advocates and researchers interested in uncovering digital inequities, auditing algorithms, and understanding human behavior. Yet data access is often restricted. How…
Privacy is a major good for users of personalized services such as recommender systems. When applied to the field of health informatics, privacy concerns of users may be amplified, but the possible utility of such services is also high.…
With the recent bloom of data, there is a huge surge in threats against individuals' private information. Various techniques for optimizing privacy-preserving data analysis are at the focus of research in the recent years. In this paper, we…
A measure of privacy infringement for agents (or participants) travelling across a transportation network in participatory-sensing schemes for traffic estimation is introduced. The measure is defined to be the conditional probability that…
Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an…
With the rapidly increasing ability to collect and analyze personal data, data privacy becomes an emerging concern. In this work, we develop a new statistical notion of local privacy to protect each categorical data that will be collected…
The recording, aggregation, and exchange of personal data is necessary to the development of socially-relevant machine learning applications. However, anecdotal and survey evidence show that ordinary people feel discontent and even anger…
Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In…
Online data sources offer tremendous promise to demography and other social sciences, but researchers worry that the group of people who are represented in online datasets can be different from the general population. We show that by…
While the entire field of privacy preserving data analytics is focused on the privacy-utility tradeoff, recent work has shown that privacy preserving data publishing can introduce different levels of utility across different population…
This work is inspired by the outbreak of COVID-19, and some of the challenges we have observed with gathering data about the disease. To this end, we aim to help collect data about citizens and the disease without risking the privacy of…
Running a randomized algorithm on a subsampled dataset instead of the entire dataset amplifies differential privacy guarantees. In this work, in a federated setting, we consider random participation of the clients in addition to subsampling…
Differential privacy is widely adopted to provide provable privacy guarantees in data analysis. We consider the problem of combining public and private data (and, more generally, data with heterogeneous privacy needs) for estimating…
Firms collect vast amounts of behavioral and geographical data on individuals. While behavioral data captures an individual's digital footprint, geographical data reflects their physical footprint. Given the significant privacy risks…
Sharing trajectories is beneficial for many real-world applications, such as managing disease spread through contact tracing and tailoring public services to a population's travel patterns. However, public concern over privacy and data…
We find separation rates for testing multinomial or more general discrete distributions under the constraint of local differential privacy. We construct efficient randomized algorithms and test procedures, in both the case where only…
We provide a detailed study of the estimation of probability distributions---discrete and continuous---in a stringent setting in which data is kept private even from the statistician. We give sharp minimax rates of convergence for…