In collaboration with Boston University, Harvard University, Institute for Employment Research, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania
AuthorsJoerg Drechsler, Ira Globus-Harris, Audra McMillan, Jayshree Sarathy, Adam Smith
This paper was accepted at the Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy workshop at the ICML 2021 conference.
This paper was accepted at the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology Journal in 2022.
Differential privacy is a restriction on data processing algorithms that provides strong confidentiality guarantees for individual records in the data. However, research on proper statistical inference, that is, research on properly quantifying the uncertainty of the (noisy) sample estimate regarding the true value in the population, is currently still limited. This paper proposes and evaluates several strategies to compute valid differentially private confidence intervals for the median. Instead of computing a differentially private point estimate and deriving its uncertainty, we directly estimate the interval bounds and discuss why this approach is superior if ensuring privacy is important. We also illustrate that addressing both sources of uncertainty--the error from sampling and the error from protecting the output--simultaneously should be preferred over simpler approaches that incorporate the uncertainty in a sequential fashion. We evaluate the performance of the different algorithms under various parameter settings in extensive simulation studies and demonstrate how the findings could be applied in practical settings using data from the 1940 Decennial Census.
Earlier this year, Apple hosted the Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML). This virtual event brought Apple and members of the academic research communities together to discuss the state of the art in the field of privacy-preserving machine learning through a series of talks and discussions over two days.
Understanding how people use their devices often helps in improving the user experience. However, accessing the data that provides such insights — for example, what users type on their keyboards and the websites they visit — can compromise user privacy. We develop a system architecture that enables learning at scale by leveraging local differential privacy, combined with existing privacy best practices. We design efficient and scalable local differentially private algorithms and provide rigorous analyses to demonstrate the tradeoffs among utility, privacy, server computation, and device bandwidth. Understanding the balance among these factors leads us to a successful practical deployment using local differential privacy. This deployment scales to hundreds of millions of users across a variety of use cases, such as identifying popular emojis, popular health data types, and media playback preferences in Safari. We provide additional details about our system in the full version.
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