Privacy and Statistical Disclosure Control

The knowledge areas of privacy and statistical disclosure control are concerned with the trade-offs between privacy and utility in data releases, applying sophisticated techniques such as differential privacy and its variants.

In many situations, such as in national censuses and medical studies, it is desirable to release statistical information about a population while at the same time protecting the privacy of individual participants in the sample. In a medical study, for instance, one may desire that the release allows the data consumer to learn statistical information about the population (e.g., the prevalence of a certain disease in the population), without allowing for violations of privacy (e.g., the user learning whether or not a particular individual has the disease). Conciliating utility requirements with privacy in a data release is, however, typically a non-trivial task.