Online Program

Assessing privacy using the area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve
*Ofer Harel, University of Connecticut 


One of the most pressing issues in the confidentiality literature is the quantification of privacy. One proposal, e-differential privacy, was set forth in Dwork [2006]; however, the selection of an appropriate e is difficult because its interpretation is unclear. The aim of this work is to provide a measure that is more easily interpreted and to allow for a social debate pertaining to how much privacy is acceptable. Our proposal sets the problem in a hypothesis testing framework and uses the area under the receiver-operator characteristic (ROC) curve as a measure of privacy. This method allows privacy to be compared using one scale, regardless of the privacy preserving mechanism. It also provides an easily interpreted privacy metric.