Utility-Privacy Tradeoffs in Databases: An Information-Theoretic Approach

Ensuring the usefulness of electronic data sources while providing necessary privacy guarantees is an important unsolved problem. This problem drives the need for an analytical framework that can quantify the privacy of personally identifiable information while still providing a quantifiable benefit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on information forensics and security 2013-06, Vol.8 (6), p.838-852
Main Authors: Sankar, L., Rajagopalan, S. R., Poor, H. V.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Data models
Data privacy
Data sources
Distortion measurement
Electronics
Encoding
equivocation
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical models
Optimization
Privacy
rate-distortion theory
side information
Utilities
Utility
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Summary:Ensuring the usefulness of electronic data sources while providing necessary privacy guarantees is an important unsolved problem. This problem drives the need for an analytical framework that can quantify the privacy of personally identifiable information while still providing a quantifiable benefit (utility) to multiple legitimate information consumers. This paper presents an information-theoretic framework that promises an analytical model guaranteeing tight bounds of how much utility is possible for a given level of privacy and vice-versa. Specific contributions include: 1) stochastic data models for both categorical and numerical data; 2) utility-privacy tradeoff regions and the encoding (sanization) schemes achieving them for both classes and their practical relevance; and 3) modeling of prior knowledge at the user and/or data source and optimal encoding schemes for both cases.
ISSN:1556-6013
1556-6021
DOI:10.1109/TIFS.2013.2253320