Hands-On Differential Privacy

Chapter 13. Planning Your First DP Project

At this point, you have learned many important concepts related to differential privacy. From core differential privacy definitions and differentially private mechanisms to setting a privacy loss budget and creating differentially private synthetic data sets, you have learned all the techniques required for a successful differential privacy project. In this chapter, we will help you get ready for your first differential privacy project. In addition to the same planning needed to bring any project to successful completion, you will also need to ensure that you are thorough in your analysis of potential privacy flaws and points of privacy leakages.

The first step in successful project planning is understanding the actors in the scenario. Throughout this book, you have learned terms like data curator and data analyst, and these terms have played a central role in illustrating key DP concepts. In practice, there are a variety of individuals, organizations, and regulations that may take on important roles during the DP analysis and deployment process. For example, a hospital may be a data owner because it is the organization that stores and has certain rights to use the data internally. The data curator in this scenario could be an individual or group within a particular office that is tasked with administering and granting limited analysis rights to external researchers. The data curator can also be distinct from the privacy loss budget allocator ...