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Am I Private and If So, how Many? Communicating Privacy Guarantees of Differential Privacy with Risk Communication Formats

Overview and composition of the seven privacy risk notifications.

Overview and composition of the seven privacy risk notifications.

Franzen, Daniel; Nunez von Voigt, Saskia; Sörries, Peter; Tschorsch, Florian; Müller-Birn, Claudia – 2022

Every day, we have to decide multiple times, whether and how much personal data we allow to be collected. This decision is not trivial, since there are many legitimate and important purposes for data collection, for examples, the analysis of mobility data to improve urban traffic and transportation. However, often the collected data can reveal sensitive information about individuals. Recently visited locations can, for example, reveal information about political or religious views or even about an individual's health. Privacy-preserving technologies, such as differential privacy (DP), can be employed to protect the privacy of individuals and, furthermore, provide mathematically sound guarantees on the maximum privacy risk. However, they can only support informed privacy decisions, if individuals understand the provided privacy guarantees. This article proposes a novel approach for communicating privacy guarantees to support individuals in their privacy decisions when sharing data. For this, we adopt risk communication formats from the medical domain in conjunction with a model for privacy guarantees of DP to create quantitative privacy risk notifications. We conducted a crowd-sourced study with 343 participants to evaluate how well our notifications conveyed the privacy risk information and how confident participants were about their own understanding of the privacy risk. Our findings suggest that these new notifications can communicate the objective information similarly well to currently used qualitative notifications, but left individuals less confident in their understanding. We also discovered that several of our notifications and the currently used qualitative notification disadvantage individuals with low numeracy: these individuals appear overconfident compared to their actual understanding of the associated privacy risks and are, therefore, less likely to seek the needed additional information before an informed decision. The promising results allow for multiple directions in future research, for example, adding visual aids or tailoring privacy risk communication to characteristics of the individuals.

Title
Am I Private and If So, how Many? Communicating Privacy Guarantees of Differential Privacy with Risk Communication Formats
Author
Franzen, Daniel; Nunez von Voigt, Saskia; Sörries, Peter; Tschorsch, Florian; Müller-Birn, Claudia
Publisher
ACM
Location
New York
Date
2022
Identifier
10.1145/3548606.3560693
Source(s)
Appeared in
Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Language
eng
Type
Text
BibTeX Code
@inproceedings{10.1145/3548606.3560693,
author = {Franzen, Daniel and Nu\~{n}ez von Voigt, Saskia and S\"{o}rries, Peter and Tschorsch, Florian and M\"{u}ller-Birn, Claudia},
title = {Am I Private and If So, How Many? Communicating Privacy Guarantees of Differential Privacy with Risk Communication Formats},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450394505},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3548606.3560693},
doi = {10.1145/3548606.3560693},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security},
pages = {1125–1139},
numpages = {15},
keywords = {differential privacy, communication, privacy risk, privacy},
location = {Los Angeles, CA, USA},
series = {CCS '22}
}