Privacy, accuracy, and consistency too: a holistic solution to contingency table release

The contingency table is a work horse of official statistics, the format of reported data for the US Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Internal Revenue Service. In many settings such as these privacy is not only ethically mandated, but frequently legally as well. Consequently there is an extensive and diverse literature dedicated to the problems of statistical disclosure control in contingency table release. However, all current techniques for reporting contingency tables fall short on at least one of privacy, accuracy, and consistency (among multiple released tables). We propose a solution that provides strong guarantees for all three desiderata simultaneously. Our approach can be viewed as a special case of a more general approach for producing synthetic data: Any privacypreserving mechanism for contingency table release begins with raw data and produces a (possibly inconsistent) privacypreserving set of marginals. From these tables alone ? and hence without weakening priv...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: PODS
• Authors: Boaz Barak, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Cynthia Dwork, Satyen Kale, Frank McSherry, Kunal Talwar
• Keywords: Contingency Table Release, Database, PODS 2007, Privacy Mechanism, Strongest Known Privacy