do not trust this
Differential privacy tools from MS Research and Harvard
21–23 of 23 posts
Re: Differential privacy tools from MS Research and Harvard
#22From https://github.com/opendifferentialprivacy/whitenoise-core : "Differential privacy is the gold standard definition of privacy protection." Differential privacy is nice, but it's still tracking and "less tracking" is absolutely not the gold standard definition of privacy protection. That title goes to "no tracking"
> That title goes to "no tracking" This is roughly analogous to "abstinence is the best form of birth control". It's not wrong, but it also isn't particularly realistic or helpful. The reality is that people often do want to exchange data, some times because it is legally or morally mandated, and tools that allow this to be done as safely as possible are important. If you have free cycles, you can read more here: htt…
Sex is a human need. Tracking people isn’t. Collecting data on people is rarely done because of a legal or moral reason. And for those cases (like medical studies) pseudonymisation and anonymisation already works well.
Re: Differential privacy tools from MS Research and Harvard
#23> The amount of information revealed from each query is calculated and deducted from an overall privacy budget to halt additional queries this is why DP doesn't get used in any real system -- limited # of searches is a deal breaker for any service that wants to monetize there are some applications where this could be okay, like in-company surveys where you want to enable employees to run stats queries without reveali…
DP is used in many large-scale production systems. For example, Google used it in their COVID-19 mobility reports [1].
Also, there are implementations of DP that do not rely on limiting queries. Lastly, most companies aren't "high trust" environments. There are tons of stories about employees routinely abuse their company's data. Companies with any sensitive data should be looking at DP and other anonymization techniques even if their data is only ever shown to their employees.