Abstract. In this work we provide efficient distributed protocols for generating shares of random noise, secure against malicious participants. The purpose of the noise generation is to create a distributed implementation of the privacy-preserving statistical databases described in recent papers [14,4,13]. In these databases, privacy is obtained by perturbing the true answer to a database query by the addition of a small amount of Gaussian or exponentially distributed random noise. The computational power of even a simple form of these databases, when the query is just of the form, that is, the sum over all rows i in the database of a function f applied to the data in row i, has been demonstrated in [4]. A distributed implementation eliminates the need for a trusted database administrator.The results for noise generation are of independent interest. The generation of Gaussian noise introduces a technique for distributing shares of many unbiased coins with fewer executions of verifiable secret sharing than would be needed using previous approaches (reduced by a factor of n). The generation of exponentially distributed noise uses two shallow circuits: one for generating many arbitrarily but identically biased coins at an amortized cost of two unbiased random bits apiece, independent of the bias, and the other to combine bits of appropriate biases to obtain an exponential distribution.

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Publishing data for analysis from a table containing personal records, while maintaining individual privacy, is a problem of increasing importance today. The traditional approach of de-identifying records is to remove identifying fields such as social security number, name etc. However, recent research has shown that a large fraction of the US population can be identified using non-key attributes (called quasi-identifiers) such as date of birth, gender, and zip code [15]. Sweeney [16] proposed the k-anonymity model for privacy where non-key attributes that leak information are suppressed or generalized so that, for every record in the modified table, there are at least k−1 other records having exactly the same values for quasi-identifiers. We propose a new method for anonymizing data records, where quasi-identifiers of data records are first clustered and then cluster centers are published. To ensure privacy of the data records, we impose the constraint 1 This work was done when the authors were Computer Science PhD students at Stanford University. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. that each cluster must contain no fewer than a pre-specified number of data records. This technique is more general since we have a much larger choice for cluster centers than k-Anonymity. In many cases, it lets us release a lot more information without compromising privacy. We also provide constant-factor approximation algorithms to come up with such a clustering. This is the first set of algorithms for the anonymization problem where the performance is independent of the anonymity parameter k. We further observe that a few outlier points can significantly increase the cost of anonymization. Hence, we extend our algorithms to allow an fraction of points to remain unclustered, i.e., deleted from the anonymized publication. Thus, by not releasing a small fraction of the database records, we can ensure that the data published for analysis has less distortion and hence is more useful. Our approximation algorithms for new clustering objectives are of independent interest and could be applicable in other clustering scenarios as well.

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We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary measures to quantify bias with respect to protected attributes such as gender and age. We then present algorithms for computing fairness-aware re-ranking of results. For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or more protected attributes. We show that such a framework can be tailored to achieve fairness criteria such as equality of opportunity and demographic parity depending on the choice of the desired distribution. We evaluate the proposed algorithms via extensive simulations over different parameter choices, and study the effect of fairness-aware ranking on both bias and utility measures. We finally present the online A/B testing results from applying our framework towards representative ranking in LinkedIn Talent Search, and discuss the lessons learned in practice. Our approach resulted in tremendous improvement in the fairness metrics (nearly three fold increase in the number of search queries with representative results) without affecting the business metrics, which paved the way for deployment to 100% of LinkedIn Recruiter users worldwide. Ours is the first large-scale deployed framework for ensuring fairness in the hiring domain, with the potential positive impact for more than 630M LinkedIn members.

Given a data set consisting of private information about individuals, we consider the online query auditing problem: given a sequence of queries that have already been posed about the data, their corresponding answers -where each answer is either the true answer or "denied" (in the event that revealing the answer compromises privacy) -and given a new query, deny the answer if privacy may be breached or give the true answer otherwise. A related problem is the offline auditing problem where one is given a sequence of queries and all of their true answers and the goal is to determine if a privacy breach has already occurred.We uncover the fundamental issue that solutions to the offline auditing problem cannot be directly used to solve the online auditing problem since query denials may leak information. Consequently, we introduce a new model called simulatable auditing where query denials provably do not leak information. We demonstrate that max queries may be audited in this simulatable paradigm under the classical definition of privacy where a breach occurs if a sensitive value is fully compromised. We also introduce a probabilistic notion of (partial) compromise. Our privacy definition requires that the a-priori probability that a sensitive value lies within some small interval is not that different from the posterior probability (given the query answers). We demonstrate that sum queries can be audited in a simulatable fashion under this privacy definition.

Suppose that party A collects private information about its users, where each user's data is represented as a bit vector. Suppose that party B has a proprietary data mining algorithm that requires estimating the distance between users, such as clustering or nearest neighbors. We ask if it is possible for party A to publish some information about each user so that B can estimate the distance between users without being able to infer any private bit of a user. Our method involves projecting each user's representation into a random, lower-dimensional space via a sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform and then adding Gaussian noise to each entry of the lower-dimensional representation. We show that the method preserves differential privacy-where the more privacy is desired, the larger the variance of the Gaussian noise. Further, we show how to approximate the true distances between users via only the lower-dimensional, perturbed data. Finally, we consider other perturbation methods such as randomized response and draw comparisons to sketch-based methods. While the goal of releasing user-specific data to third parties is more broad than preserving distances, this work shows that distance computations with privacy is an achievable goal.

It is well known that if n balls are inserted into n bins, with high probability, the bin with maximum load contains (1 + o(1)) log n/ log log n balls. Azar, Broder, Karlin, and Upfal [1] showed that instead of choosing one bin, if d ≥ 2 bins are chosen at random and the ball inserted into the least loaded of the d bins, the maximum load reduces drastically to log log n/ log d + O(1). In this paper, we study the two choice balls and bins process when balls are not allowed to choose any two random bins, but only bins that are connected by an edge in an underlying graph. We show that for n balls and n bins, if the graph is almost regular with degree n ǫ , where ǫ is not too small, the previous bounds on the maximum load continue to hold. Precisely, the maximum load is log log n+O(1/ǫ)+O(1). So even if the graph has degree n Ω(1/ log log n) , the maximum load is O(log log n). For general ∆-regular graphs, we show that the maximum load is log log n+O( log n log(∆/ log 4 n) )+O(1) and also provide an almost matching lower bound of log log n+ log n log(∆ log n) . Further this does not hold for non-regular graphs even if the minimum degree is high.Vöcking [29] showed that the maximum bin size with d choice load balancing can be further improved to O(log log n/d) by breaking ties to the left. This requires d random bin choices. We show that such bounds can be achieved by making only two random accesses and querying d/2 contiguous bins in each access. By grouping a sequence of n bins into 2n/d groups, each of d/2 consecutive bins, if each ball chooses two groups at random and inserts the new ball into the least-loaded bin in the lesser loaded group, then the maximum load is O(log log n/d) with high probability. Furthermore, it also turns out that this partitioning into aligned groups of size d/2 is also essential in achieving this bound, that is, instead of choosing two aligned groups, if we simply choose random but possibly unaligned random sets of d/2 consecutive bins, then the maximum load jumps to