User-Centered Deployment of Differential Privacy

Differential privacy (DP) has been accepted as the de facto standard for data privacy in the research community and beyond. Both companies and government agencies are trying to deploy DP technologies. Broader deployments of DP technology, however, face challenges. This project aims to understand the needs of different stakeholders in data privacy, and to advance the understanding of user-centered DP and lay a foundation for its deployment. Specifically, we propose to examine individual human users' perception, comprehension, and acceptance of the concept and guarantee of DP and the effect of privacy parameter, and to investigate effective ways to communicate those concepts. We also plan to implement methods from the domains of human factors and human-computer interaction to identify tasks, goals, and workflow in private data sharing.

This project is being supported by NSF SaTC grant.