When collecting information, local differential privacy (LDP) alleviates privacy concerns of users, as users' private information is randomized before being sent to the central aggregator. However, LDP results in loss of utility due to the amount of noise that is added. To address this issue, recent work introduced an intermediate server and with the assumption that this intermediate server did not collude with the aggregator. Using this trust model, one can add less noise to achieve the same privacy guarantee; thus improving the utility. In this paper, we investigate this multiple-party setting of LDP. We first analyze the threat model and identify potential adversaries. We then make observations about existing approaches and propose new techniques that achieve a better privacy-utility tradeoff than existing ones. Finally, we perform experiments to compare different methods and demonstrate the benefits of using our proposed method.
We give efficient protocols and matching accuracy lower bounds for frequency estimation in the local model for differential privacy. In this model, individual users randomize their data themselves, sending differentially private reports to an untrusted server that aggregates them. We study protocols that produce a succinct histogram representation of the data. A succinct histogram is a list of the most frequent items in the data (often called "heavy hitters") along with estimates of their frequencies; the frequency of all other items is implicitly estimated as 0. If there are n users whose items come from a universe of size d, our protocols run in time polynomial in n and log(d). With high probability, they estimate the accuracy of every item up to error O(√ log(d) (e2n) ). Moreover, we show that this much error is necessary, regardless of computational efficiency, and even for the simple setting where only one item appears with significant frequency in the data set. Previous protocols (Mishra and Sandler, 2006; Hsu, Khanna and Roth, 2012) for this task either ran in time Ω(d) or had much worse error (about √[6] log(d) (e2n) ), and the only known lower bound on error was Ω(1 √ n ). We also adapt a result of (2010) to the local setting. In a model with public coins, we show that each user need only send 1 bit to the server. For all known local protocols (including ours), the transformation preserves computational efficiency. In local differential privacy (LDP), each user perturbs her data locally before sending the noisy data to a data collector. The latter then analyzes the data to obtain useful statistics. Unlike the setting of centralized differential privacy, in LDP the data collector never gains access to the exact values of sensitive data, which protects not only the privacy of data contributors but also the collector itself against the risk of potential data leakage. Existing LDP solutions in the literature are mostly limited to the case that each user possesses a tuple of numeric or categorical values, and the data collector computes basic statistics such as counts or mean values. To the best of our knowledge, no existing work tackles more complex data mining tasks such as heavy hitter discovery over set-valued data. In this paper, we present a systematic study of heavy hitter mining under LDP. We first review existing solutions, extend them to the heavy hitter estimation, and explain why their effectiveness is limited. We then propose LDPMiner, a two-phase mechanism for obtaining accurate heavy hitters with LDP. The main idea is to first gather a candidate set of heavy hitters using a portion of the privacy budget, and focus the remaining budget on refining the candidate set in a second phase, which is much more efficient budget-wise than obtaining the heavy hitters directly from the whole dataset. We provide both in-depth theoretical analysis and extensive experiments to compare LDPMiner against adaptations of previous solutions. The results show that LDPMiner significantly improves over existing methods. More importantly, LDPMiner successfully identifies the majority true heavy hitters in practical settings. We study the problem of estimating @math -ary distributions under @math -local differential privacy. @math samples are distributed across users who send privatized versions of their sample to a central server. All previously known sample optimal algorithms require linear (in @math ) communication from each user in the high privacy regime @math , and run in time that grows as @math , which can be prohibitive for large domain size @math . @PARASPLIT We propose Hadamard Response (HR), a local privatization scheme that requires no shared randomness and is symmetric with respect to the users. Our scheme has order optimal sample complexity for all @math , a communication of at most @math bits per user, and nearly linear running time of @math . @PARASPLIT Our encoding and decoding are based on Hadamard matrices and are simple to implement. The statistical performance relies on the coding theoretic aspects of Hadamard matrices, ie, the large Hamming distance between the rows. An efficient implementation of the algorithm using the Fast Walsh-Hadamard transform gives the computational gains. @PARASPLIT We compare our approach with Randomized Response (RR), RAPPOR, and subset-selection mechanisms (SS), both theoretically, and experimentally. For @math , our algorithm runs about 100x faster than SS, and RAPPOR. We present new practical local differentially private heavy hitters algorithms achieving optimal or near-optimal worst-case error and running time -- TreeHist and Bitstogram. In both algorithms, server running time is @math and user running time is @math , hence improving on the prior state-of-the-art result of Bassily and Smith [STOC 2015] requiring @math server time and @math user time. With a typically large number of participants in local algorithms ( @math in the millions), this reduction in time complexity, in particular at the user side, is crucial for making locally private heavy hitters algorithms usable in practice. We implemented Algorithm TreeHist to verify our theoretical analysis and compared its performance with the performance of Google's RAPPOR code.   Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response, or RAPPOR, is a technology for crowdsourcing statistics from end-user client software, anonymously, with strong privacy guarantees. In short, RAPPORs allow the forest of client data to be studied, without permitting the possibility of looking at individual trees. By applying randomized response in a novel manner, RAPPOR provides the mechanisms for such collection as well as for efficient, high-utility analysis of the collected data. In particular, RAPPOR permits statistics to be collected on the population of client-side strings with strong privacy guarantees for each client, and without linkability of their reports. This paper describes and motivates RAPPOR, details its differential-privacy and utility guarantees, discusses its practical deployment and properties in the face of different attack models, and, finally, gives results of its application to both synthetic and real-world data. 