Centering Policy and Practice: Research Gaps Around Usable Differential Privacy

Rachel Cummings, Jayshree Sarathy

Abstract: Differential privacy is seen by many experts as the ‘gold standard’ for privacy-preserving data analysis. Others argue that while differential privacy is a clean formulation in theory, it is not very workable in practice. Both perspectives are, in our view, valid and important. To bridge the gaps, researchers and practitioners must work together to advance policy and practice of differential privacy. In this paper, we outline the pressing open questions and offer recommendations around making differential privacy more usable in practice.