SaTC: CORE: Small: A Novel Mechanism for Effective and Accountable Communication of Differential Privacy through Multi-Stakeholder Research

Differential privacy is a state-of-the-art computing technique to protect individual data privacy in a dataset while allowing meaningful statistical analyses on the dataset. Currently, many barriers inhibit the implementation of differential privacy in real-world computing systems, one of which is the difficulty of communicating a specific system's actual privacy protection afforded by its differential privacy implementation. This project designs a standardized differential privacy certificate (DP certificate) to effectively communicate the privacy protection afforded by differential privacy to audiences with varying technical backgrounds, creates technical methods to ensure the contents of the DP certificate are accountable, and develops a software toolkit to help generate the DP certificate for a given system. The project's novelty is to create an effective and accountable way to communicate the actual privacy protection of differential privacy. The project's broader significance includes establishing a communication standard and facilitating the broader adoption of differential privacy. This project involves multi-area computing research. It includes a series of human subject research with multiple differential privacy stakeholder groups (e.g., differential privacy adopters, the general public, and differential privacy and standardization experts) to design a standardized DP certificate that can be understood by audiences with varying technical backgrounds, as well as formal methods research to create an accountability framework and relevant verification tools to verify key parameters on a DP certificate against the actual system. This project also develops a proof-of-concept software toolkit that helps differential privacy adopters create accountable DP certificates for their systems so that they can publicize their systems' privacy protection to the general public. The project outcomes establish a novel mechanism for effective and accountable communication of differential privacy, as well as widen the adoption and acceptance of differential privacy in real-world computing systems. This project's broader impacts include creating a differential privacy communication standard through the DP certificate, increasing public trust in differential privacy through the formal verification of privacy guarantee, and cultivating stakeholder appreciation for differential privacy through collaborative dissemination activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.