Equity and Privacy: More Than Just a Tradeoff
This work identifies a new equity concern in privacy technology deployment, which is important for ensuring fair outcomes in data-driven decisions, though it is incremental as it builds on prior findings about utility disparities.
The paper addresses the tradeoff between privacy and equity in data publishing, highlighting that privacy-preserving methods can introduce varying utility levels across different population groups, which is critical for research and policy-making applications.
While the entire field of privacy preserving data analytics is focused on the privacy-utility tradeoff, recent work has shown that privacy preserving data publishing can introduce different levels of utility across different population groups. It is important to understand this new tradeoff between privacy and equity as privacy technology is being deployed in situations where the data products will be used for research and policy making. Will marginal populations see disproportionately less utility from privacy technology? If there is an inequity how can we address it?