1,652 research outputs found
Selling Privacy at Auction
We initiate the study of markets for private data, though 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. On the other hand, 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 auctions can
naturally be viewed and optimally solved as variants of multi-unit procurement
auctions. Based on this result, we derive auctions for two natural settings
which are optimal up to small constant factors:
1. In the setting in which 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.
2. In the setting in which 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 analysts 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 individuals 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.Comment: Extended Abstract appeared in the proceedings of EC 201
How to Balance Privacy and Money through Pricing Mechanism in Personal Data Market
A personal data market is a platform including three participants: data
owners (individuals), data buyers and market maker. Data owners who provide
personal data are compensated according to their privacy loss. Data buyers can
submit a query and pay for the result according to their desired accuracy.
Market maker coordinates between data owner and buyer. This framework has been
previously studied based on differential privacy. However, the previous study
assumes data owners can accept any level of privacy loss and data buyers can
conduct the transaction without regard to the financial budget. In this paper,
we propose a practical personal data trading framework that is able to strike a
balance between money and privacy. In order to gain insights on user
preferences, we first conducted an online survey on human attitude to- ward
privacy and interest in personal data trading. Second, we identify the 5 key
principles of personal data market, which is important for designing a
reasonable trading frame- work and pricing mechanism. Third, we propose a
reason- able trading framework for personal data which provides an overview of
how the data is traded. Fourth, we propose a balanced pricing mechanism which
computes the query price for data buyers and compensation for data owners
(whose data are utilized) as a function of their privacy loss. The main goal is
to ensure a fair trading for both parties. Finally, we will conduct an
experiment to evaluate the output of our proposed pricing mechanism in
comparison with other previously proposed mechanism
A dominant strategy, double clock auction with estimation-based tatonnement
The price mechanism is fundamental to economics but difficult to reconcile with incentive compatibility and individual rationality. We introduce a double clock auction for a homogeneous good market with multidimensional private information and multiunit traders that is deficit‐free, ex post individually rational, constrained efficient, and makes sincere bidding a dominant strategy equilibrium. Under a weak dependence and an identifiability condition, our double clock auction is also asymptotically efficient. Asymptotic efficiency is achieved by estimating demand and supply using information from the bids of traders that have dropped out and following a tâtonnement process that adjusts the clock prices based on the estimates
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