Google AI Blog

DP-Auditorium: A flexible library for auditing differential privacy

Posted by Mónica Ribero Díaz, Research Scientist, Google Research Differential privacy (DP) is a property of randomized mechanisms that limit the influence of any individual user’s information while processing and analyzing data. DP offers a robust solution to address growing concerns about data protection, enabling technologies across industries and government applications (e.

arXiv AI
Jul 13

How to DP-fy Your Data: A Practical Guide to Generating Synthetic Data With Differential Privacy

arXiv:2512. 03238v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: High quality data is needed to unlock the full potential of AI for end users.

By Natalia Ponomareva, Zheng Xu, H. Brendan McMahan, Peter Kairouz, Lucas Rosenblatt, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Crist\'obal Guzm\'an, Ryan McKenna, Galen Andrew, Alex Bie, Da Yu, Alex Kurakin, Morteza Zadimoghaddam, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Andreas Terzis
Simon Willison
Sep 11

Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases

Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 are new security patch releases for the current alpha series and the stable 0.65.x family. The updates address security fixes that are important for public-facing Datasette instances, especially those that mix public and private tables. The patches were developed after an extensive audit using advanced AI models and collaborative review, and the process will be incorporated into future development work.

arXiv AI
Oct 21

Reliable Estimation of Differential Privacy under Selection Bias

The paper addresses a flaw in differential privacy audits where selection bias in Membership Inference Attacks leads to overestimated lower bounds on privacy leakage. By applying statistical correction methods, the authors demonstrate that uncorrected audits can violate theoretical privacy guarantees up to four times more often than claimed, while corrected audits maintain valid bounds at the nominal confidence level.

By Valentin Dorseuil (DI-ENS), Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva Annamalai (UCL), Jamal Atif (CMAP), Olivier Capp\'e (DI-ENS), Nicolas Papernot (Inria)
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

Rethinking Anonymity Claims in Synthetic Data Generation: A Model-Centric Privacy Attack Perspective

The paper argues that evaluating anonymity in synthetic data generation must focus on the generative model rather than just the resulting dataset. It interprets GDPR definitions of personal data and anonymization under realistic model-access scenarios, mapping these to state‑of‑the‑art privacy attacks. The authors conclude that synthetic data alone is insufficient for anonymization, and that Differential Privacy offers stronger protection than Similarity‑based Privacy Metrics.

By Georgi Ganev, Emiliano De Cristofaro
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Subgroup Membership Inference Audits of Differentially Private Synthetic Text

The paper introduces a subgroup-targeted membership inference game to audit differentially private synthetic text releases, revealing that existing average-case attacks miss significant leakage to vulnerable subgroups. An extensive audit across 32 proxies, four datasets, three generation methods, and five privacy budgets shows that DP reduces overall leakage but leaves concentrated, uneven residual risk, especially for high-risk records. The study demonstrates that which records leak is determined by the release mechanism rather than the records themselves, challenging record-level risk assessment.

By Yidan Sun, Viktor Schlegel, Srinivasan Nandakumar, Siew Kei Lam, Anil Anthony Bharath
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Predictability as a Fine-Grained Measure for Privacy

arXiv:2606. 20546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differential privacy (DP) ensures rigorous individual-level privacy guarantees against even the most knowledgeable attackers, but its worst-case nature can impose a costly privacy-accuracy tradeoff.

By Linda Lu, Karthik Sridharan