PrivTru: A Privacy-by-Design Data Trustee Minimizing Information Leakage

TL;DR

PrivTru is a privacy-by-design data trustee that minimizes information leakage during data sharing by calculating the minimal necessary information needed to respond to queries, ensuring privacy without sacrificing utility.

Contribution

This paper introduces PrivTru, a novel data trustee framework that provably minimizes information leakage while maintaining data utility, guided by privacy-by-design principles.

Findings

PrivTru minimizes information leakage regardless of prior knowledge.

PrivTru preserves data utility while ensuring privacy.

The approach is theoretically optimal in privacy protection.

Abstract

Data trustees serve as intermediaries that facilitate secure data sharing between independent parties. This paper offers a technical perspective on Data trustees, guided by privacy-by-design principles. We introduce PrivTru, an instantiation of a data trustee that provably achieves optimal privacy properties. Therefore, PrivTru calculates the minimal amount of information the data trustee needs to request from data sources to respond to a given query. Our analysis shows that PrivTru minimizes information leakage to the data trustee, regardless of the trustee's prior knowledge, while preserving the utility of the data.