Paper accepted at CODASPY

Our work "From Theory to Comprehension: A Comparative Study of Differential Privacy and k-Anonymity" has been accepted for publication at CODASPY 2024. The preprint is available here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.04006.pdf

Abstract: The notion of 𝜀-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 dif- ferential privacy mechanism with a set 𝜀. In this study, we focus on users’ comprehension of the privacy protection provided by a differential privacy mechanism. To do so, we study three vari- ants of explaining the privacy protection provided by differential privacy: (1) the original mathematical definition; (2) 𝜀 translated into a specific privacy risk; and (3) an explanation using the ran- domized 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’ compre- hension 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.