The Five Safes as a Privacy Context

Abstract: The Five Safes is a framework used by national statistical offices (NSO) for assessing and managing the disclosure risk of data sharing. This paper makes two points: Firstly, the Five Safes can be understood as a specialization of a broader concept $\unicode{x2013}$ contextual integrity $\unicode{x2013}$ to the situation of statistical dissemination by an NSO. We demonstrate this by mapping the five parameters of contextual integrity onto the five dimensions of the Five Safes. Secondly, the Five Safes contextualizes narrow, technical notions of privacy within a holistic risk assessment. We demonstrate this with the example of differential privacy (DP). This contextualization allows NSOs to place DP within their Five Safes toolkit while also guiding the design of DP implementations within the broader privacy context, as delineated by both their regulation and the relevant social norms.