A Programming Framework for Differential Privacy with Accuracy Concentration Bounds
This work addresses a gap in differential privacy tools for data analysts by enabling accuracy reasoning alongside privacy guarantees, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing compositional privacy frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem that existing differential privacy programming languages lack support for reasoning about accuracy, and they presented DPella, a framework that provides data analysts with tools to reason about privacy, accuracy, and their trade-offs, demonstrating its flexibility on classical and hierarchical counting queries.
Differential privacy offers a formal framework for reasoning about privacy and accuracy of computations on private data. It also offers a rich set of building blocks for constructing data analyses. When carefully calibrated, these analyses simultaneously guarantee privacy of the individuals contributing their data, and accuracy of their results for inferring useful properties about the population. The compositional nature of differential privacy has motivated the design and implementation of several programming languages aimed at helping a data analyst in programming differentially private analyses. However, most of the programming languages for differential privacy proposed so far provide support for reasoning about privacy but not for reasoning about the accuracy of data analyses. To overcome this limitation, in this work we present DPella, a programming framework providing data analysts with support for reasoning about privacy, accuracy and their trade-offs. The distinguishing feature of DPella is a novel component which statically tracks the accuracy of different data analyses. In order to make tighter accuracy estimations, this component leverages taint analysis for automatically inferring statistical independence of the different noise quantities added for guaranteeing privacy. We show the flexibility of our approach by not only implementing classical counting queries (e.g., CDFs) but also by analyzing hierarchical counting queries (like those done by Census Bureaus), where accuracy have different constraints per level and data analysts should figure out the best manner to calibrate privacy to meet the accuracy requirements.