Private Frequency Estimation via Projective Geometry
In collaboration with University of California, Berkeley
AuthorsVitaly Feldman*, Jelani Nelson*, Huy Nguyen*, Kunal Talwar*
In collaboration with University of California, Berkeley
AuthorsVitaly Feldman*, Jelani Nelson*, Huy Nguyen*, Kunal Talwar*
In this work, we propose a new algorithm ProjectiveGeometryResponse (PGR) for locally differentially private (LDP) frequency estimation. For a universe size of
Our new algorithm is based on using Projective Planes over a finite field to define a small collection of sets that are close to being pairwise independent and a dynamic programming algorithm for approximate histogram reconstruction on the server side.
We also give an extension of PGR, which we call HybridProjectiveGeometryResponse, that allows trading off computation time with utility smoothly.
*=Equal Contributors
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.