The Target-Charging Technique for Privacy Accounting across Interactive Computations

02/21/2023

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by   Edith Cohen, et al.

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We propose the Target Charging Technique (TCT), a unified privacy analysis framework for interactive settings where a sensitive dataset is accessed multiple times using differentially private algorithms. Unlike traditional composition, where privacy guarantees deteriorate quickly with the number of accesses, TCT allows computations that don't hit a specified target, often the vast majority, to be essentially free (while incurring instead a small overhead on those that do hit their targets). TCT generalizes tools such as the sparse vector technique and top-k selection from private candidates and extends their remarkable privacy enhancement benefits from noisy Lipschitz functions to general private algorithms.