Who's Asking? Audience-Conditioned Privatization
The abundance of user-generated conversational data makes the question of how to responsibly derive insights from confidential data without putting the individuals in it at risk ever more important. However, the majority of existing differentially private (DP) synthetic text generation (SDG) and anonymization approaches ignore the context of the data's downstream usage, which results in loss of important information. DP-SDG provides the same guarantee regardless of the recipient, and anonymization relies on predefined attribute categories. They both ignore the observation that an attribute that is harmless to one audience can be sensitive to another, and each audience typically needs only some attributes preserved. We propose Ext-Classify-Priv, a framework that (1) extracts the information types present in a corpus, (2) classifies which of them are private for a given audience following contextual integrity, and (3) protects only those attributes, using either anonymization or SDG with Feature-DP approaches. On Reddit data with 3 audiences, our audience-specific releases are more faithful than a single audience-agnostic release for every audience. On bioRxiv data, our SDG method improves MAUVE from 0.097 to 0.420 at epsilon=1 and on the proprietary real estate data, our anonymization method improves MAUVE from 0.698 to 0.959 over the best baselines.