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28 lines
No EOL
1.5 KiB
Markdown
28 lines
No EOL
1.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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date:
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created: 2025-07-01T17:30:00Z
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categories:
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- Explainers
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authors:
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- fria
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tags:
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- Privacy Enhancing Technologies
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- Differential Privacy
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license: BY-SA
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schema_type: BackgroundNewsArticle
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description: |
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Privacy Pass is a new way to privately authenticate with a service. Let's look at how it could change the way we use services.
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---
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# Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Series: Differential Privacy
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Is it possible to collect data from a large group of people but protect each individual's privacy? In this entry of my series on privacy-enhancing technologies, we'll discuss differential privacy and how it can do just that.<!-- more -->
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## Problem
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It's useful to collect data from a large group of people. You can see trends in a population. But it requires a lot of individual people to give up personally identifiable information. Even things that seem inocuous like your gender can help identify you.
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Latanya Sweeney in a [paper](https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pdf) from 2000 used U.S. Census data to try and re-identify people solely based on the metrics available to her. She found that 87% of Americans could be identified based on only 3 metrics: ZIP code, date of birth, and sex.
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## History
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Most of the concepts I write about seem to come from the 70's and 80's, but differential privacy is a relatively new concept. It was first introduced in a paper from 2006 called [*Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis*](https://desfontain.es/PDFs/PhD/CalibratingNoiseToSensitivityInPrivateDataAnalysis.pdf) |