Differentially Private Real-Time Release of Sequential Data

Abstract

Many data analytics applications rely on temporal data, generated (and possibly acquired) sequentially for online analysis. How to release this type of data in a privacy-preserving manner is of great interest and more challenging than releasing one-time, static data. Because of the (potentially strong) temporal correlation within the data sequence, the overall privacy loss can accumulate significantly over time; an attacker with statistical knowledge of the correlation can be particularly hard to defend against. An idea that has been explored in the literature to mitigate this problem is to factor this correlation into the perturbation/noise mechanism. Existing work, however, either focuses on the offline setting (where perturbation is designed and introduced after the entire sequence has become available), or requires a priori information on the correlation in generating perturbation. In this study we propose an approach where the correlation is learned as the sequence is generated, and is used for estimating future data in the sequence. This estimate then drives the generation of the noisy released data. This method allows us to design better perturbation and is suitable for real-time operations. Using the notion of differential privacy, we show this approach achieves high accuracy with lower privacy loss compared to existing methods.