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arXiv · 2404.04006

From Theory to Comprehension: A Comparative Study of Differential Privacy and $k$-Anonymity

Saskia Nuñez von Voigt·Luise Mehner·Florian Tschorsch
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Abstract

The notion of $\varepsilon$-differential privacy is a widely used concept of providing quantifiable privacy to individuals. However, it is unclear how to explain the level of privacy protection provided by a differential privacy mechanism with a set $\varepsilon$. In this study, we focus on users' comprehension of the privacy protection provided by a differential privacy mechanism. To do so, we study three variants of explaining the privacy protection provided by differential privacy: (1) the original mathematical definition; (2) $\varepsilon$ translated into a specific privacy risk; and (3) an explanation using the randomized response technique. We compare users' comprehension of privacy protection employing these explanatory models with their comprehension of privacy protection of $k$-anonymity as baseline comprehensibility. Our findings suggest that participants' comprehension of differential privacy protection is enhanced by the privacy risk model and the randomized response-based model. Moreover, our results confirm our intuition that privacy protection provided by $k$-anonymity is more comprehensible.

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Saskia Nuñez von Voigt, Luise Mehner, Florian Tschorsch. 2024-04-05. From Theory to Comprehension: A Comparative Study of Differential Privacy and $k$-Anonymity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04006

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