Mutual Information as Privacy-Loss Measure in Strategic Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic model where a sender balances accurate communication with privacy preservation, using mutual information as a privacy-loss measure, and analyzes the resulting equilibrium strategies.

Contribution

It presents a novel game-theoretic framework that quantifies privacy leakage via mutual information in strategic communication settings.

Findings

Equilibrium strategies balance accuracy and privacy.

Mutual information effectively measures privacy leakage.

Properties of equilibrium strategies are characterized.

Abstract

A game is introduced to study the effect of privacy in strategic communication between well-informed senders and a receiver. The receiver wants to accurately estimate a random variable. The sender, however, wants to communicate a message that balances a trade-off between providing an accurate measurement and minimizing the amount of leaked private information, which is assumed to be correlated with the to-be-estimated variable. The mutual information between the transmitted message and the private information is used as a measure of the amount of leaked information. An equilibrium is constructed and its properties are investigated.