Issues Encountered Deploying Differential Privacy

TL;DR

This paper discusses the practical challenges faced by the U.S. Census Bureau in implementing differential privacy, highlighting issues like personnel, tools, and parameter setting that hinder real-world deployment.

Contribution

It identifies and analyzes key obstacles in transitioning differential privacy from theory to practice within a major government agency.

Findings

Challenges in personnel and infrastructure for implementation

Difficulty in setting and verifying privacy parameters

Mismatch between privacy mechanisms and data user needs

Abstract

When differential privacy was created more than a decade ago, the motivating example was statistics published by an official statistics agency. In attempting to transition differential privacy from the academy to practice, the U.S. Census Bureau has encountered many challenges unanticipated by differential privacy's creators. These challenges include obtaining qualified personnel and a suitable computing environment, the difficulty accounting for all uses of the confidential data, the lack of release mechanisms that align with the needs of data users, the expectation on the part of data users that they will have access to micro-data, and the difficulty in setting the value of the privacy-loss parameter, $\epsilon$ (epsilon), and the lack of tools and trained individuals to verify the correctness of differential privacy implementations.