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Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

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Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#41

Post by maximeago »

specialist wrote: post #40

Much needed. Great opportunity. Happy hunting. > ...the API provides synthetic data samples with the same schema and statistical distribution by default Neat. Repurposing test data generators. I like it. > Our model is a software license to run on our clients’ cloud. Just to confirm my understanding: Sarus never sees the client's data? Cool. -- I'm fine with differential privacy. I haven't read those most recent pape…

You're correct, Sarus never sees the data. The software runs directly on the data infrastructure of the client. It's typically deployed on the public cloud for instance.

And here, of course, differential privacy only guarantees the data protection in the flow of data between the data source and the data practitioner. It should not be a replacement for other best practices like the ones you mention.

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#42

Post by vincentlp »

specialist wrote: post #40

Much needed. Great opportunity. Happy hunting. > ...the API provides synthetic data samples with the same schema and statistical distribution by default Neat. Repurposing test data generators. I like it. > Our model is a software license to run on our clients’ cloud. Just to confirm my understanding: Sarus never sees the client's data? Cool. -- I'm fine with differential privacy. I haven't read those most recent pape…

Absolutely, Sarus never sees the client's data, because the software runs on their infrastructure.

And indeed, data encryption and privacy-preserving analysis (what Sarus does) is quite orthogonal. You may combine them for some use cases (so that data are protected on the machine, but also cannot be re-identified from queries) For example, on our infra (used only for demo, not for clients), by default all data are encrypted at rest by the cloud provider. You could even try to add FHE (Fully homomorphic encryption), but that's quite complex (and probably wouldn't support many type of data analysis).

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#44

Post by ngrislain »

TedTed wrote: post #43

This looks exciting, thank you for sharing! Implementing differential privacy correctly is famously difficult and easy to get wrong. Will you be making the privacy-critical part of your code available publicly for people to audit?

You are absolutely right, we are leveraging many open-source bricks to build our product, so that they can be reviewed, mainly:

- https://github.com/google/differential-privacy (for basic mechanisms and PLD accounting)

- https://github.com/tensorflow/privacy (for DP-SGD and RDP accounting)

- https://github.com/opendp (for our SQL module)

We actively contribute to some of them.

We also open-sourced some tech bricks we are using:

- https://github.com/sarus-tech/dp-xgboost (see also https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.12770.pdf)

We plan to continue building trust in the tools we are using by publishing some of them.

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#45

Post by maximeago »

XCSme wrote: post #27
maximeago wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product solves the problem of the time it takes to access sensitive data for analytics and machine learning. When you work in a large healthcare or financial organization, each dataset is highly protected. Each time a data practitioner needs to work on it, they may have to wait for months for compliance processes to opine on a data masking strategy and engineering teams to prepare a data lab and implement this st…

Thanks, this makes it a lot more clear! Maybe the hero text could be more clear, explaining in summary what it does (similar to this comment). "Get instant access to sensitive data for analytics and machine learning."

That's a great suggestion actually! We'll definitely work on it and thanks for your help.

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#47

Post by maximeago »

vmuel wrote: post #46

Very interesting! Looking forward to hearing more from you guys. What distinguishes you from other differential privacy companies such as Privitar or Leapyear?

Privitar and Leapyear are indeed part of competition on the more mature side of the spectrum. Even if all three of us use differential privacy, I would say that each company's core value prop is a bit different:

- Sarus: replaces the manual governance of data access by "no-access". Analysts or data scientists can manipulate data without accessing it. The absence of access means that the process is considerably simplified and no longer relies on many manual decisions and controls. Differential privacy is here as a way to automate protection.

- Privitar: it is a more traditional data governance solution. It is all about controls and manual decisions. In their own works, they feature an "unbeatable breadth of privacy techniques". Differential privacy is one of them. They leave it to the privacy professional to make their own implementation decisions, which is exactly what Sarus offers to disrupt.

- Leapyear: it is a data analysis solution powered by differential privacy. It does not seek to replace existing data governance processes. This is why they don't focus on blending into existing data workflows and only offers differential privacy as an way to access where Sarus can disappear into existing operations without requiring a learning curve on the part of analysts and data scientists.

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#48

Post by vmuel »

maximeago wrote: post #47
vmuel wrote: post #46

Very interesting! Looking forward to hearing more from you guys. What distinguishes you from other differential privacy companies such as Privitar or Leapyear?

Privitar and Leapyear are indeed part of competition on the more mature side of the spectrum. Even if all three of us use differential privacy, I would say that each company's core value prop is a bit different: - Sarus: replaces the manual governance of data access by "no-access". Analysts or data scientists can manipulate data without accessing it. The absence of access means that the process is considerably simpli…

Thanks a lot, very clear!

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#49

Post by RonaldOlzheim »

specialist wrote: post #40

Much needed. Great opportunity. Happy hunting. > ...the API provides synthetic data samples with the same schema and statistical distribution by default Neat. Repurposing test data generators. I like it. > Our model is a software license to run on our clients’ cloud. Just to confirm my understanding: Sarus never sees the client's data? Cool. -- I'm fine with differential privacy. I haven't read those most recent pape…

Do you have Linkedin?

Re: Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy

#50

Post by maximeago »

RonaldOlzheim wrote: post #49
specialist wrote: post #40

Much needed. Great opportunity. Happy hunting. > ...the API provides synthetic data samples with the same schema and statistical distribution by default Neat. Repurposing test data generators. I like it. > Our model is a software license to run on our clients’ cloud. Just to confirm my understanding: Sarus never sees the client's data? Cool. -- I'm fine with differential privacy. I haven't read those most recent pape…

Do you have Linkedin?

Yes, Sarus is on https://www.linkedin.com/company/sarus-technologies, feel free to follow us or add the founders directly.
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