Abstract
One of the most pressing issues in the confidentiality literature is the quantification of privacy. One proposal, \( \epsilon \)-differential privacy, moves away from absolute guarantees of privacy to relative guarantees. However, the selection of an appropriate \( \epsilon \) is difficult because its interpretation is unclear. Further, when comparing different privacy preserving techniques to one another, a direct comparison cannot be made by simply comparing the respective values of \( \epsilon \). The aim of this work is to provide a measure that allows for direct comparison across different privacy schemes and is more easily interpreted. In turn, this will aid in policy debate pertaining to how much privacy is acceptable. Our proposal sets the problem in a hypothesis testing framework and uses the area under the receiver-operator characteristic (ROC) curve as a measure of privacy.
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Matthews, G.J., Harel, O. & Aseltine, R.H. Assessing database privacy using the area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve. Health Serv Outcomes Res Method 10, 1–15 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10742-010-0061-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10742-010-0061-3