Equity and Privacy: More Than Just a Tradeoff

TL;DR

This paper explores the emerging tradeoff between privacy and equity in data publishing, highlighting potential disparities in utility for marginalized groups and emphasizing the need to address these inequities in privacy technology deployment.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of privacy-utility- equity tradeoff, analyzing how privacy-preserving methods may disproportionately affect marginalized populations and proposing ways to mitigate these disparities.

Findings

Privacy-preserving data publishing can lead to utility disparities across groups

Marginalized populations may experience less utility from privacy technologies

Addressing equity is crucial in deploying privacy-preserving data analytics

Abstract

While the entire field of privacy preserving data analytics is focused on the privacy-utility tradeoff, recent work has shown that privacy preserving data publishing can introduce different levels of utility across different population groups. It is important to understand this new tradeoff between privacy and equity as privacy technology is being deployed in situations where the data products will be used for research and policy making. Will marginal populations see disproportionately less utility from privacy technology? If there is an inequity how can we address it?