Related papers: The Boundary Between Privacy and Utility in Data A…
We explore and compare a variety of definitions for privacy and disclosure limitation in statistical estimation and data analysis, including (approximate) differential privacy, testing-based definitions of privacy, and posterior guarantees…
Human mobility data is a crucial resource for urban mobility management, but it does not come without personal reference. The implementation of security measures such as anonymization is thus needed to protect individuals' privacy. Often, a…
Privacy definitions provide ways for trading-off the privacy of individuals in a statistical database for the utility of downstream analysis of the data. In this paper, we present Blowfish, a class of privacy definitions inspired by the…
We propose a practical methodology to protect a user's private data, when he wishes to publicly release data that is correlated with his private data, in the hope of getting some utility. Our approach relies on a general statistical…
Privacy is a well-understood concept in the physical world, with us all desiring some escape from the public gaze. However, while individuals might recognise locking doors as protecting privacy, they have difficulty practising equivalent…
Anonymization is a foundational principle of data privacy regulation, yet its practical application remains riddled with ambiguity and inconsistency. This paper introduces the concept of anonymity-washing -- the misrepresentation of the…
Attribute inference - the process of analyzing publicly available data in order to uncover hidden information - has become a major threat to privacy, given the recent technological leap in machine learning. One way to tackle this threat is…
The ability to preserve user privacy and anonymity is important. One of the safest ways to maintain privacy is to avoid storing personally identifiable information (PII), which poses a challenge for maintaining useful user statistics.…
Consider a pair of random variables $(X,Y)$ distributed according to a given joint distribution $p_{XY}$. A curator wishes to maximally disclose information about $Y$, while limiting the information leakage incurred on $X$. Adopting mutual…
Privacy is an increasingly important aspect of data publishing. Reasoning about privacy, however, is fraught with pitfalls. One of the most significant is the auxiliary information (also called external knowledge, background knowledge, or…
It is becoming increasingly clear that users should own and control their data. Utility providers are also becoming more interested in guaranteeing data privacy. As such, users and utility providers should collaborate in data privacy, a…
Differential privacy formalises privacy-preserving mechanisms that provide access to a database. We pose the question of whether Bayesian inference itself can be used directly to provide private access to data, with no modification. The…
The increasing prevalence of large-scale data collection in modern society represents a potential threat to individual privacy. Addressing this threat, for example through privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), requires a rigorous…
A privacy-utility tradeoff is developed for an arbitrary set of finite-alphabet source distributions. Privacy is quantified using differential privacy (DP), and utility is quantified using expected Hamming distortion maximized over the set…
It is obligatory that organizations by law safeguard the privacy of individuals when handling data sets containing personal identifiable information (PII). Nevertheless, during the process of data privatization, the utility or usefulness of…
We study an information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios where the private data is either observable or hidden. In each scenario, we first consider bounded mutual information as privacy leakage criterion, then we…
The protection of private information is a crucial issue in data-driven research and business contexts. Typically, techniques like anonymisation or (selective) deletion are introduced in order to allow data sharing, e. g. in the case of…
In this paper we consider the problem of anonymizing datasets in which each individual is associated with a set of items that constitute private information about the individual. Illustrative datasets include market-basket datasets and…
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot support users to precisely balance privacy protection and output performance during individual consultations. We introduce Adanonymizer, an anonymization plug-in that allows users to control this…
Anonymizing sensitive information in user text is essential for privacy, yet existing methods often apply uniform treatment across attributes, which can conflict with communicative intent and obscure necessary information. This is…