Differentially Private Release of Israel's National Registry of Live Births

TL;DR

This paper details a novel methodology for releasing Israel's national live birth registry data with differential privacy guarantees, balancing data utility and privacy in a complex, real-world setting.

Contribution

It introduces new concepts for microdata release desiderata and a bundling approach using private selection, pioneering a first-of-its-kind differential privacy release of national registry data.

Findings

First differentially private release of Israel's birth registry data.

Developed a flexible, innovative methodology for microdata privacy.

Achieved a privacy guarantee with ε = 9.98 for sensitive data.

Abstract

In February 2024, Israel's Ministry of Health released microdata of live births in Israel in 2014. The dataset is based on Israel's National Registry of Live Births and offers substantial value in multiple areas, such as scientific research and policy-making, while providing pure differential privacy guarantee with $\varepsilon = 9.98$ for 2014's mothers and newborns. The release was co-designed by the authors along with stakeholders from both inside and outside the Ministry of Health. This paper presents the methodology used to obtain that release, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in the world. The design process has been challenging and required flexibility and open-mindedness on all sides involved, along with substantial technical innovation. In particular, we introduce new concepts regarding the desiderata from dataset releases in a microdata format, as well as a way to bundle together multiple quantitative desiderata for a differentially private release using the private selection algorithm of Liu and Talwar (STOC 2019). We hope that the experiences reported here will be useful to future differentially private releases.