Inferential or Differential: Privacy Laws Dictate (1202.3686v1)

Abstract: So far, privacy models follow two paradigms. The first paradigm, termed inferential privacy in this paper, focuses on the risk due to statistical inference of sensitive information about a target record from other records in the database. The second paradigm, known as differential privacy, focuses on the risk to an individual when included in, versus when not included in, the database. The contribution of this paper consists of two parts. The first part presents a critical analysis on differential privacy with two results: (i) the differential privacy mechanism does not provide inferential privacy, (ii) the impossibility result about achieving Dalenius's privacy goal [5] is based on an adversary simulated by a Turing machine, but a human adversary may behave differently; consequently, the practical implication of the impossibility result remains unclear. The second part of this work is devoted to a solution addressing three major drawbacks in previous approaches to inferential privacy: lack of flexibility for handling variable sensitivity, poor utility, and vulnerability to auxiliary information.