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Enabling developers and organizations to use differential privacy
- m3kw9 7y agoTo me what ever privacy google talks of doing is and should be taken with a massive Asterisk
- homonculus1 7y agoIt should just be wholly disregarded. These companies are utterly untrustworthy and any belief that they suddenly care about your interests for some reason is naïve.
- mplanchard 7y agoIronically, I cannot see the article on Firefox for iOS without disabling tracking prevention.
- s_Hogg 7y agoReally? I've got Privacy Badger working in my browser (chrome) and everything is fine. Wonder what the specific difference is.
- lnyng 7y agoMaybe because the privacy policy is “differential”?
- mosselman 7y agoYou might have added some exceptions for Google in your Privacy Badger installation or PB hasn't recognised Google as a tracker (yet). Although I have to add that my computer's installation of Firefox (with all tracking protections enabled) does not make this blog unreadable. My settings in ublock do though (third party requests are all blocked).
- panpanna 7y agoThis site loads JavaScript from a large number of sites (~6-8 domains, 20 sites in total). This is not "tracking" per se, you can get the site working by accepting JavaScript from the "right" sites (if you know which are not for tracking).
- the_duke 7y agoSince neither the post nor the repo explain it, some context if you have no clue what this is about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#%CE%B5-differential_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#%CE%B5-di...
- ramraj07 7y agoThanks. I found their technical paper to be approachable as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01917 https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01917
- kuu 7y agoI mean, the text explains it: Differentially-private data analysis is a principled approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow any individual's data to be distinguished or re-identified.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoWell they don’t explain the mechanism well: > The 2006 paper presents both a mathematical definition of differential privacy and a mechanism based on the addition of Laplace noise that satisfies the definition.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThis is literally: "$Method is a $buzzword that enables $DesirableThing". If you already know that $DesirableThing is desirable, this sentence tells you nothing about how $Method works.
- chii 7y agoit may take too much technical expertise to know that $method works. For example, most people don't understand asymetric encryption, but still "blindly" trust that it works because they are told by a trusted authority.
- summerlight 7y ago
- vijaybritto 7y agoIs google using this in their own products? They were just fined $170M in the past few days!
- londons_explore 7y agoI think you'll find legislators are less worried about something being "mathematically proven to protect privacy robustly", and more worried about just collecting money from someone publicly perceived as evil. If they cared about actual privacy, they would go after no-name ad networks and data mining companies.
- bathtub365 7y agoDo you have information showing that the FTC's ruling was unjust? As far as the companies they go after, I think going after large brand-name ad networks and data mining companies like Google is at least as important as going after the no-name ones.
- simion314 7y agoAnd why not start with the source? Google and Facebook sell your data to the ad networks, maybe Google and Facebook receive more complaints against then some unknown ad networks that we did not know even existed before GDPR forced the sites to disclose them.
- aorav 7y agoCould you provide some source about Google selling your data to ad networks? Because Google explicitly says that they don’t do that and none of the fines received by Google is for selling your data. I’m curious to read about this.
- capitol_ 7y agoIt was on HN yesterday: https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/ https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/
- thecleaner 7y agoI expect Google to file a patent for this soon.
- sveme 7y agoApple has been talking (and implementing) Differential Privacy for years.
- panpanna 7y ago(differential privacy originated from independent research by Cynthia dvoark (name?) & others) I think he was joking, referring to a recent trend where Google gets questionably broad patents on security solutions.
- cromwellian 7y agoChrome was shipping differential privacy (RAPPOR) before Apple.
- thecleaner 7y agoI hope people are aware that Google has filed patents for Batch Normalization and Dropout. Both methods are very broad.
- cromwellian 7y agoTrue, and would be a concern if Google had a litigious history of being a patent shakedown artist.
- JohnFen 7y agoIt's a concern regardless.
- cromwellian 7y agoAgreed. My observation is that patent shakedowns are the last resort of a market loser. Once your company starts losing vast amounts of marketshare to competitors, the patent warchest comes out. IBM and Microsoft were notorious for this, as was AT&T. Microsoft has reformed recently.
- pixelcort 7y agoIn addition to Differential Privacy, Secure Multiparty Computation is another way to maintain privacy, while allowing computation across multiple users. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computati... The benefit of this is that you can get an exact computation, whereas with differential privacy the output is rougher. The benefit of differential privacy is that it does not rely on the trust of a majority of other users; you can theoretically verify that a certain percent of the time your device sends out a wrong answer.
- perone 7y agoThe only issue is that you won't be able to find reasonable libraries for it, all of them are just PoCs without testing or stability.
- ginger_beer_m 7y agoCheck out https://www.openmined.org https://www.openmined.org
- aloknnikhil 7y agoKyber has a pretty solid implementation of Shamir Sharing. But Shamir Sharing itself has security concerns. https://godoc.org/gopkg.in/dedis/kyber.v2/share https://godoc.org/gopkg.in/dedis/kyber.v2/share https://github.com/dedis/kyber https://github.com/dedis/kyber
- Ar-Curunir 7y agoSecret sharing is a tiny component of MPC; you need much more to compute anything useful.
- v4dok 7y agoMPC works only hand-in-hand with DP. MPC ensures that you don't have access to the "remote" dataset, but does nothing to mitigate model "memorising" specific private information (if we are talking about advanced analytics that is)
- xafke 7y agoI made a video about this a while back: https://youtu.be/gI0wk1CXlsQ https://youtu.be/gI0wk1CXlsQ I think it's good that someone is putting in the work and open sourcing tools to make differential privacy easier. But at the same time I'm wondering if this is just a smokescreen put up by Google.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoThe problem I see with differential privacy is this: One part of the public doesn't care about privacy enough to demand things like that, the other part wouldn't trust the math and the implementation behind it. I mean, I consider myself moderately knowledgeable about statistics, but even I have problems understanding DP. Worse, scientists who are supposed to use it will also have a harder time understanding DP over their usual methods.
- Spivak 7y agoI mean it's nothing to do really with the math. It's the fact that you have to send the real data to an untrusted 3rd party and rely on their word that they will anonymize your data. And if a situation arises where a manager at Google has to make the decision to 'slightly' reduce the effectiveness of differential privacy because they need a certain metric for a report do you really think they're going to make the principled choice?
- Ar-Curunir 7y agoThe same can be said for end-to-end encryption...
- JohnFen 7y ago> the other part wouldn't trust the math and the implementation behind it. I trust the math and method just fine, but I'm in the "won't trust the implementation" group. Ad companies like Google have demonstrated they can't be trusted too many times for me to think that they'll do DP in a way that goes against their business interest.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TedTed 7y agoHi, I'm one of the authors of the scientific paper¹ linked in this blog post. Incidentally, I wrote a series of blog posts explaining differential privacy in layman's terms. The first post might be "not-technical-enough" for HackerNews, but maybe the next in the series make up for it. Feedback welcome =) - https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-awesomeness.html https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-awesomene... - https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-in-more-detail.html https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-in-more-d... - https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-in-practice.html https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-in-practi... - https://desfontain.es/privacy/almost-differential-privacy.html https://desfontain.es/privacy/almost-differential-privacy.ht... (describes a core intuition behind the system described in our paper) - https://desfontain.es/privacy/local-global-differential-privacy.html https://desfontain.es/privacy/local-global-differential-priv... I also think Section 2 of the paper should be readable by most folks with a basic understanding of SQL and differential privacy. ¹ https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01917 https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01917
- drfuchs 7y agoAfter page 20 of your paper are pages of junk that I don't expect you mean to have there (at least in the PDF version).
- TedTed 7y agoYeah, thanks, I messed up the upload to arXiv >< It'll be fixed tonight with the updated version.
- antpls 7y agoAfter reading all your links, I'm still not sure why or where Differential Privacy is needed. 1) How could aggregated data (means, average, min max) be used by attackers? Aren't aggregated data already private? For example, the Google postgres extension returns aggregated data, why is DP required here? 2) In the case of sharing entire databases, if all the PII are removed, why does it matter that we can match two records from two databases? Yes we can do correlation between 2 databases, but if PII were not gathered and stored at all in any database, there would be no privacy issue in the first place.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoFundamentally, Google's initiative on differential privacy is motivated by a desire to not lose data-based ad targeting while trying to hinder the real solution: Blocking data collection entirely and letting their business fail. In a world where Google is now hurting content creators and site owners more than it is helping them[1], I see no reason to help Google via differential privacy when outright blocking tracking data is a viable solution. [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-result-in-a-click/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches...
- benologist 7y agoIt's like the push to keep loot boxes legal by Microsoft and Nintendo. The EU is on the verge of outlawing their use because they encourage kids to gamble. MS and Nintendo hope that if loot boxes reveal their 0.00000001% odds they no longer resemble $5/spin slot machines.
- criddell 7y ago> In a world where Google is now hurting content creators and site owners more than it is helping them I have a hard time believing that because so few sites opt out of Google indexing.
- 7y ago
- mailshanx 7y agoSomething that always bothered me when I read posts on Google's blogs: why is it that it's always authored by a PM? Why can't perhaps a senior engineer also write an announcement post occasionally? Yes, the names of the engineers on the team are present in the acknowledgement section: but, this is a single line at the bottom of the post, whereas the name of the PM and the fact that he is the author is featured prominently below the title. This pattern is common across many product/OSS library announcements. Sure, one could argue that the PM has a holistic view of the product or library being announced, and that developing this perspective is in fact their job. But surely a sufficiently senior engineer can (and often does) have an equally holistic, or perhaps even more insightful overview. At least sometimes. Even if this were not the case, why not acknowledge everyone's contributions at the same place in the article? I think this is symptomatic of the ubiquitous class divide between the "suits" and "nerds" in the corporate world.
- bt848 7y ago"Always" seems like a stretch. I just selected a random month of the google.ai blog archive and 5 of 5 were written by non-PMs.
- summerlight 7y agoIn my observation, it's mostly because engineers usually don't want to write this kind of articles which needs to be reviewed by multiple stakeholders. If they want to write its themselves, I believe it's possible and there's some instances as well.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoWow, Googlers in full force today. This isn't a market that needs to be powered. This is a market that needs to be shut down. Targeted advertising is inherently harmful to society.
- summerlight 7y agoWell, the problem here is that the market doesn't agree with you so it exists. I don't want to argue on the topic of justice (which is pretty subjective), but your argument should give a rationale what is the value of following your solution and why it is more beneficial to the society with an objective measures instead of giving a groundless dogmatic assertion.
- blub 7y agoMarkets are amoral and should not be used to justify anything. You're essentially arguing that something is beneficial to society because it makes money (mostly for Google).
- eclipxe 7y agoThat's your opinion. Not everyone shares that opinion. Advertising has its place in society - as a revenue stream for publishers, as a way to build awareness of a product or service. Just because you personally don't like something, doesn't mean it is harmful to society.
- blub 7y agoThis is not a matter of opinion and focusing on advertising is a red herring, because Google is not just doing advertising, it's using mass surveillance in order to target advertising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism Surveillance capitalism is harming privacy and the idea of a free society. It gives the people holding the collected information massive power over others.
- eclipxe 7y ago
- colton 7y agoThere are a number of interesting technical challenges related to making differential privacy work in production (e.g. implementing novel algorithms for ML and statistical inference, proving privacy properties). If you are interested in learning more, my company (LeapYear) is hiring differential privacy researchers, as well as software engineers interested in developing an enterprise machine learning platform. Some background on our team: We recently raised our Series B, and hired VMWare’s first VP of Engineering, who scaled VMWare from 15 to 750+ engineers. Almost all of our backend code is written in Haskell. On the commercial side, we’ve signed several multi-million dollar contracts with Fortune 100 customers in financial services, healthcare, & tech, and deployed on sensitive data at petabyte scale. Happy to answer questions and review applications submitted here: https://leapyear.ai/careers https://leapyear.ai/careers
- rpglover64 7y agoHi Colton! Having worked at LeapYear for just over 3 years now, I can confirm that it's a good place to work and is solving interesting technical problems. I can also answer questions, if anyone is interested.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- QuadrupleA 7y agoI think this HN adtech paranoia is getting a little extreme lately, e.g. many of the comments from "ocdtrekkie" here ("Wow, Googlers in full force today.", "This is a market that needs to be shut down.") I definitely share mixed feelings about these adtech companies, and tend to think these personalized, targeted surveillance ads should die. But what about just plain old contextual, relevant ads, e.g. ads for car parts on a hot rod site? There's a place for web advertising in general - it supports "free" sites in a better than any other model invented thus far. I don't think it's gonna be possible to burn the whole place down and go back to 1993. Subscriptions work for large high-value offerings like Netflix or NY Times, but average people with small sites are unlikely to be able to provide that level of value. Other alternatives like micropayments always seem to fail, because even if viewing an article costs 1-cent or 1/100 cent, it causes users to hand-wring and watch their usage carefully, deliberate about their browsing choices and eventually stop. It's a psychological thing - people loved it when AOL switched from by-the-minute billing to unlimited, even though they generally paid less under the old scheme. Suddenly they were free to just browse without thinking about it, which is also what ad-sponsored content enables on the web. There are certainly people who just create for attention / altruism alone and get no material reward - more power to them - but they'll have to keep their day jobs. In a way I'm gratified to see adblocking taking off, because the ad industry constantly misbehaves and does every sleazy desperate thing it can - from seizure-flashes and automatically-opening popup windows in the 90s, to performance-killing HTML5 garbage ads, distracting animations and creepy privacy-invading remarketing stuff today. Desperate, annoying junk that is indeed killing the web (and people's trust in advertising). I personally think a move back to classy, non-personalized ads could be the way to go, ideally static images that don't track you and don't fry your CPU & battery with 700 javsacript libraries. That may be wishful thinking too. But perhaps the ad industry can try a little harder to stem the tide of garbage and win people's trust back a bit.
- enraged_camel 7y ago>>But what about just plain old contextual, relevant ads, e.g. ads for car parts on a hot rod site? Those existed before Google/Facebook/et al were a thing. You don’t need “adtech” for them. Adtech by and large refers to the insanely complex tech infrastructure behind tracking people across the Internet and using a variety of tricks and dark-semi-dark patterns to try to get them to click ads, at the definite but not immediately obvious expense of privacy.
- formalsystem 7y agoDifferential privacy doesn't mean privacy via something like encryption. It means that a company can query the dataset without exposing sensitive information about a small population in the dataset. You still have to trust the company hosting the dataset so distributed solutions lend themselves more naturally to trust.
- rpglover64 7y agoWhile this is true, there's some nuance. First of all, there's a lot of recent (and not so recent) work in Local Differential Privacy [1], which uses the "untrusted curator" model. Although this software doesn't use it, the article mentions RAPPOR, which is a good example. Second of all, encryption protects your _data_, but not your _privacy_; that is, assuming your data gets used in any way, you have no guarantees about whether the result reveals anything you'd rather keep secret. Of course, if you're talking about normal encryption, your data _can't_ be used, but then you're not really sharing it at all, as much as storing it there (like Dropbox). But once you start talking about things like homomorphic encryption or secure multiparty computation, it's important to keep in mind that they are complements to differential privacy, not replacements. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_differential_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_differential_privacy
- joefkelley 7y agoI read the article, thought to myself, "let's see how HN finds a way to say this is actually bad for privacy", clicked through to comments here, and was not disappointed. The hivemind anti-Google kneejerking is quite out of control.
- spookthesunset 7y agoIt really is getting out of control. Anything with "google" in the title gets overrun with people with an axe to grind. It is very tiring.