Selling privacy at auction
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Publication:2347786
DOI10.1016/J.GEB.2013.06.013zbMATH Open1318.91093arXiv1011.1375OpenAlexW1965093697MaRDI QIDQ2347786FDOQ2347786
Authors: Arpita Ghosh, Aaron Roth 
Publication date: 8 June 2015
Published in: Games and Economic Behavior (Search for Journal in Brave)
Abstract: We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we propose to build such a theory. Specifically, we consider a setting in which a data analyst wishes to buy information from a population from which he can estimate some statistic. The analyst wishes to obtain an accurate estimate cheaply. On the other hand, the owners of the private data experience some cost for their loss of privacy, and must be compensated for this loss. Agents are selfish, and wish to maximize their profit, so our goal is to design truthful mechanisms. Our main result is that such auctions can naturally be viewed and optimally solved as variants of multi-unit procurement auctions. Based on this result, we derive auctions for two natural settings which are optimal up to small constant factors: 1. In the setting in which the data analyst has a fixed accuracy goal, we show that an application of the classic Vickrey auction achieves the analyst's accuracy goal while minimizing his total payment. 2. In the setting in which the data analyst has a fixed budget, we give a mechanism which maximizes the accuracy of the resulting estimate while guaranteeing that the resulting sum payments do not exceed the analysts budget. In both cases, our comparison class is the set of envy-free mechanisms, which correspond to the natural class of fixed-price mechanisms in our setting. In both of these results, we ignore the privacy cost due to possible correlations between an individuals private data and his valuation for privacy itself. We then show that generically, no individually rational mechanism can compensate individuals for the privacy loss incurred due to their reported valuations for privacy.
Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.1375
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Cited In (28)
- Reproducibility and transparency versus privacy and confidentiality: reflections from a data editor
- An incentive mechanism for trading personal data in data markets
- Privacy in implementation
- Establishing the price of privacy in federated data trading
- Optimal and differentially private data acquisition: central and local mechanisms
- Removal and threshold pricing: truthful two-sided markets with multi-dimensional participants
- Accuracy for sale: aggregating data with a variance constraint
- Data curation from privacy-aware agents
- Privacy, patience, and protection
- Towards a mechanism for incentivating privacy
- Pricing GAN-based data generators under Rényi differential privacy
- Auctions for partial heterogeneous preferences
- Approximate privacy: foundations and quantification
- Mechanism design for demand management in energy communities
- Is your privacy for sale? An experiment on the willingness to reveal sensitive information
- Private matchings and allocations
- Private matchings and allocations
- On the behavioral implications of differential privacy
- The empirical implications of privacy-aware choice
- Optimized, direct sale of privacy in personal data marketplaces
- A differential privacy mechanism that accounts for network effects for crowdsourcing systems
- Buying data from privacy-aware individuals: the effect of negative payments
- Bayesian privacy
- Worst-case mechanism design via Bayesian analysis
- Approximately optimal mechanism design via differential privacy
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- Differential privacy in constant function market makers
- A theory of pricing private data
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