Assessing the Privacy of Randomized Vector--Valued Queries to a Database Using the Area Under the Receiver-Operating Characteristic Curve

• Activity Number: 233
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Gregory J. Matthews*+ and Ofer Harel, Ph.D.
• Companies: University of Massachusetts and University of Connecticut
• Keywords: Privacy ; ROC curve ; Statistical Disclosure Limitation

Abstract

As the amount of data generated continues to increase, consideration of individuals' privacy is a growing concern. As a result, there has been a vast quantity of research done on methods of statistical disclosure control (SDC). Some of these methods propose to release a randomized version of the data rather than the actual data. While methods of this type certainly offer some layer of protection since no actual data is released, there is still the potential for private information to be disclosed. Quantifying the level of privacy provided by these methods is often difficult. In the past, a method for assessing privacy using the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve based on ideas related to differential privacy has been proposed. However, the method was only demonstrated for univariate randomized releases. Here, the ROC based privacy measure is extended to the release of randomized vectors.