Differential Privacy Under Continual Observation

We ask the question ? how can websites and data aggregators continually release updated statistics, and meanwhile preserve each individual user's privacy? We propose a differentially private continual counter that outputs at every time step the approximate number of 1's seen thus far. Our counter construction has error that is only poly-log in the number of time steps. We can extend the basic counter construction to allow websites to continually give top-k and hot items suggestions while preserving users' privacy.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: STOC
• Authors: Cynthia Dwork, Moni Naor, Toniann Pitassi and Guy Rothblum
• Keywords: Algorithms, Basic Counter Construction, Individual User Privacy, Private Continual Counter, STOC 2010