From Theory to Comprehension: A Comparative Study of Differential Privacy and k-Anonymity

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Saskia Nuñez von Voigt - , Technical University of Berlin (Author)
  • Luise Mehner - , Technical University of Berlin (Author)
  • Florian Tschorsch - , Chair of Privacy and Data Security (Author)

Abstract

The notion of ε-differential privacy is a widely used concept of providing quantifiable privacy to individuals. However, it is unclear how to explain the level of privacy protection provided by a differential privacy mechanism with a set ε. In this study, we focus on users’ comprehension of the privacy protection provided by a differential privacy mechanism. To do so, we study three variants of explaining the privacy protection provided by differential privacy: (1) the original mathematical definition; (2) ε translated into a specific privacy risk; and (3) an explanation using the randomized response technique. We compare users’ comprehension of privacy protection employing these explanatory models with their comprehension of privacy protection of k-anonymity as baseline comprehensibility. Our findings suggest that participants’ comprehension of differential privacy protection is enhanced by the privacy risk model and the randomized response-based model. Moreover, our results confirm our intuition that privacy protection provided by k-anonymity is more comprehensible.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCODASPY '24: Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
Pages221 - 232
Number of pages12
ISBN (electronic)9798400704215
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85199063857

Keywords

Keywords

  • differential privacy, explanatory model, study