Universally Optimal Privacy Mechanisms for Minimax Agents

Abstract: A scheme that publishes aggregate information about sensitive data must resolve the trade-off between utility to information consumers and privacy of the database participants. Differential privacy is a well-established definition of privacy--this is a universal guarantee against all attackers, whatever their side-information or intent. In this paper, we present a universal treatment of utility based on the standard minimax rule from decision theory (in contrast to the utility model in, which is Bayesian). In our model, information consumers are minimax (risk-averse) agents, each possessing some side-information about the query, and each endowed with a loss-function which models their tolerance to inaccuracies. Further, information consumers are rational in the sense that they actively combine information from the mechanism with their side-information in a way that minimizes their loss. Under this assumption of rational behavior, we show that for every fixed count query, a certain geometric mechanism is universally optimal for all minimax information consumers. Additionally, our solution makes it possible to release query results at multiple levels of privacy in a collusion-resistant manner.