Private and Continual Release of Statistics

  • Authors:
  • T.-H. Hubert Chan;Elaine Shi;Dawn Song

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Hong Kong;Palo Alto Research Center;University of California, Berkeley

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We ask the question: how can Web sites and data aggregators continually release updated statistics, and meanwhile preserve each individual user’s privacy? Suppose we are given a stream of 0’s and 1’s. We propose a differentially private continual counter that outputs at every time step the approximate number of 1’s seen thus far. Our counter construction has error that is only poly-log in the number of time steps. We can extend the basic counter construction to allow Web sites to continually give top-k and hot items suggestions while preserving users’ privacy.