Practical Considerations for Differential Privacy

Kareem Amin, Alex Kulesza, Sergei Vassilvitskii

Abstract: Differential privacy is the gold standard for statistical data release. Used by governments, companies, and academics, its mathematically rigorous guarantees and worst-case assumptions on the strength and knowledge of attackers make it a robust and compelling framework for reasoning about privacy. However, even with landmark successes, differential privacy has not achieved widespread adoption in everyday data use and data protection. In this work we examine some of the practical obstacles that stand in the way.