Privacy

Goals

  • Analyze basic definitions of privacy
  • Diagnose broken attempts to achieve privacy
  • Reason about the implications of differential privacy

Conceptions of Privacy

  • What are some basic conceptions of privacy?
    • What are some limitations of each?
  • What is contextual privacy?
  • Compare/constrast informational vs. decisional privacy
  • How can we achieve limited access and control?
  • How have notions of privacy changed through history?

Early Attempts at Data Privacy

De-identification

  • What are the two goals for privacy-preserving data disclosure?
  • Why is removing user identifiers insufficient to preserve privacy?
  • What are two forms of de-anonymization attacks?
    • How did the Netflix-IMDB attack work?
      • How does the support of an attribute affect its weight?
  • Why do information amplification attacks work?
  • How effective are the Netflix attacks?
  • How effective is re-identification via linking?

K-Anonymity

  • How is k-anonymity defined?
  • How can a database be put into a k-anonymous form?
  • What are three attacks on k-anonymity and how do they work?
  • How does k-anonymity compose?
    • Ex: If Alice is included in one database with X-anonymity and another with Y-anonymity, what is her effective Z-anonymity level?

Differential Privacy

  • What impossibility result did Dwork and Naor prove?
    • What implications does it have for privacy-preserving data disclosure?
  • Give an intuitive definition of differential privacy
  • Give the formal definition of differential privacy
    • What does the definition imply?
  • How does differential privacy compose?
    • Ex: If Alice is included in one database with X-DiffPriv and another with Y-DiffPriv, what is her effective Z-DiffPriv level?
  • How can DiffPriv be used in practice?
  • How can DiffPriv be achieved in practice?
  • Define function sensitivity
    • Calculate function sensitivity for some exmaple database query functions
      • What would it be for median? Max? Min?
  • What is the Laplace mechanism?
    • What does it imply about choices of function and epsilon?