Catch a Blowfish Alive: A Demonstration of Policy-Aware Differential Privacy for Interactive Data Exploration

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Abstract

Policy-aware differential privacy (DP) frameworks such as Blowfish privacy enable more accurate query answers than standard DP. In this work, we build the first policy-aware DP system for interactive data exploration, BlowfishDB, that aims to (i) provide bounded and flexible privacy guarantees to the data curators of sensitive data and (ii) support accurate and efficient data exploration by data analysts. However, the specification and processing of customized privacy policies incur additional performance cost, especially for datasets with a large domain. To address this challenge, we propose dynamic Blowfish privacy which allows for the dynamic generation of smaller privacy policies and their data representations at query time. BlowfishDB ensures same levels of accuracy and privacy as one would get working on the static privacy policy. In this demonstration of BlowfishDB, we show how a data curator can fine-tune privacy policies for a sensitive dataset and how a data analyst can retrieve accuracy-bounded query answers efficiently without being a privacy expert.