Achieving Transparency Report Privacy in Linear Time

Abstract

An accountable algorithmic transparency report (ATR) should ideally investigate (a) transparency of the underlying algorithm, and (b) fairness of the algorithmic decisions, and at the same time preserve data subjects’ privacy. However, a provably formal study of the impact to data subjects’ privacy caused by the utility of releasing an ATR (that investigates transparency and fairness), has yet to be addressed in the literature. The far-fetched benefit of such a study lies in the methodical characterization of privacy-utility trade-offs for release of ATRs in public, and their consequential application-specific impact on the dimensions of society, politics, and economics. In this paper, we first investigate and demonstrate potential privacy hazards brought on by the deployment of transparency and fairness measures in released ATRs. To preserve data subjects’ privacy, we then propose a linear-time optimal-privacy scheme, built upon standard linear fractional programming (LFP) theory, for announcing ATRs, subject to constraints controlling the tolerance of privacy perturbation on the utility of transparency schemes. Subsequently, we quantify the privacy-utility trade-offs induced by our scheme, and analyze the impact of privacy perturbation on fairness measures in ATRs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analytical work that simultaneously addresses trade-offs between the triad of privacy, utility, and fairness, applicable to algorithmic transparency reports.