What is Differential Privacy?
Brief
What is Differential Privacy?
Image: Privacy Guides / Jordan Warne
Is it possible to collect data from a large group of people but protect each individual's privacy? In this entry of my series on privacy-enhancing technologies , we'll discuss differential privacy and how it can do just that.
Problem
It's useful to collect data from a large group of people. You can see trends in a population. But it requires a lot of individual people to give up personally identifiable information. Even things that seem innocuous like your gender can help identify you.
Latanya Sweeney in a paper from 2000 used U. S. Census data to try and re-identify people solely based on the metrics available to her. She found that 87% of Americans could be identified based on only 3 metrics: ZIP code, date of birth, and sex.