On the Difficulties of Disclosure Prevention in Statistical Databases or The Case for Differential Privacy

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Cynthia Dwork
Moni Naor

Abstract

In 1977 Tore Dalenius articulated a desideratum for statistical databases: nothing about

an individual should be learnable from the database that cannot be learned without access to the

database
. We give a general impossibility result showing that a natural formalization of Dalenius’

goal cannot be achieved if the database is useful. The key obstacle is the side information that

may be available to an adversary. Our results hold under very general conditions regarding the

database, the notion of privacy violation, and the notion of utility.



Contrary to intuition, a variant of the result threatens the privacy even of someone not in

the database. This state of affairs motivated the notion of differential privacy [15, 16], a strong

ad omnia privacy which, intuitively, captures the increased risk to one’s privacy incurred by

participating in a database.

Article Details

How to Cite
Dwork, Cynthia, and Moni Naor. 2010. “On the Difficulties of Disclosure Prevention in Statistical Databases or The Case for Differential Privacy”. Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality 2 (1). https://doi.org/10.29012/jpc.v2i1.585.
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