Communications of the ACM
On the value of private information
TARK '01 Proceedings of the 8th conference on Theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge
Practical privacy: the SuLQ framework
Proceedings of the twenty-fourth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
Mechanism Design via Differential Privacy
FOCS '07 Proceedings of the 48th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Optimal mechanism design and money burning
STOC '08 Proceedings of the fortieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Universally utility-maximizing privacy mechanisms
Proceedings of the forty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Differential privacy: a survey of results
TAMC'08 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Theory and applications of models of computation
Approximate privacy: foundations and quantification (extended abstract)
Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
FOCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Impossibility of Differentially Private Universally Optimal Mechanisms
FOCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
On the approximability of budget feasible mechanisms
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Calibrating noise to sensitivity in private data analysis
TCC'06 Proceedings of the Third conference on Theory of Cryptography
Mechanisms for complement-free procurement
Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
For sale : your data: by : you
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
GUPT: privacy preserving data analysis made easy
SIGMOD '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
Budget feasible mechanism design: from prior-free to bayesian
STOC '12 Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Towards statistical queries over distributed private user data
NSDI'12 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation
Approximately optimal auctions for selling privacy when costs are correlated with data
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Privacy-aware mechanism design
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Conducting truthful surveys, cheaply
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Buying private data at auction: the sensitive surveyor's problem
ACM SIGecom Exchanges
Is privacy compatible with truthfulness?
Proceedings of the 4th conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science
Insured access: an approach to ad-hoc information sharing for virtual organizations
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
Privacy auctions for recommender systems
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Take it or leave it: running a survey when privacy comes at a cost
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
A theory of pricing private data
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Database Theory
Information preservation in statistical privacy and bayesian estimation of unattributed histograms
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
CAMEO: a middleware for mobile advertisement delivery
Proceeding of the 11th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Truthful mechanisms for agents that value privacy
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Privacy and coordination: computing on databases with endogenous participation
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
ACM SIGecom Exchanges
Mechanism design in large games: incentives and privacy
Proceedings of the 5th conference on Innovations in theoretical computer science
Redrawing the boundaries on purchasing data from privacy-sensitive individuals
Proceedings of the 5th conference on Innovations in theoretical computer science
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We initiate the study of markets for private data, through the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we propose to build such a theory. Specifically, we consider a setting in which a data analyst wishes to buy information from a population from which he can estimate some statistic. The analyst wishes to obtain an accurate estimate cheaply, while the owners of the private data experience some cost for their loss of privacy, and must be compensated for this loss. Agents are selfish, and wish to maximize their profit, so our goal is to design truthful mechanisms. Our main result is that such problems can naturally be viewed and optimally solved as variants of multi-unit procurement auctions. Based on this result, we derive auctions which are optimal up to small constant factors for two natural settings: When the data analyst has a fixed accuracy goal, we show that an application of the classic Vickrey auction achieves the analyst's accuracy goal while minimizing his total payment. When the data analyst has a fixed budget, we give a mechanism which maximizes the accuracy of the resulting estimate while guaranteeing that the resulting sum payments do not exceed the analyst's budget. In both cases, our comparison class is the set of envy-free mechanisms, which correspond to the natural class of fixed-price mechanisms in our setting. In both of these results, we ignore the privacy cost due to possible correlations between an individual's private data and his valuation for privacy itself. We then show that generically, no individually rational mechanism can compensate individuals for the privacy loss incurred due to their reported valuations for privacy. This is nevertheless an important issue, and modeling it correctly is one of the many exciting directions for future work.