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A Theory of Pricing Private Data

Published: 30 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Personal data has value to both its owner and to institutions who would like to analyze it. Privacy mechanisms protect the owner's data while releasing to analysts noisy versions of aggregate query results. But such strict protections of the individual's data have not yet found wide use in practice. Instead, Internet companies, for example, commonly provide free services in return for valuable sensitive information from users, which they exploit and sometimes sell to third parties.
As awareness of the value of personal data increases, so has the drive to compensate the end-user for her private information. The idea of monetizing private data can improve over the narrower view of hiding private data, since it empowers individuals to control their data through financial means.
In this article we propose a theoretical framework for assigning prices to noisy query answers as a function of their accuracy, and for dividing the price amongst data owners who deserve compensation for their loss of privacy. Our framework adopts and extends key principles from both differential privacy and query pricing in data markets. We identify essential properties of the pricing function and micropayments, and characterize valid solutions.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems
    ACM Transactions on Database Systems  Volume 39, Issue 4
    Invited Articles Issue, SIGMOD 2013, PODS 2013 and ICDT 2013
    December 2014
    341 pages
    ISSN:0362-5915
    EISSN:1557-4644
    DOI:10.1145/2691190
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    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. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 30 December 2014
    Accepted: 01 August 2014
    Revised: 01 August 2014
    Received: 01 October 2013
    Published in TODS Volume 39, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Differential privacy
    2. arbitrage
    3. data pricing

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    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed

    Funding Sources

    • NSF CNS-0964094
    • European Research Council under the Webdam grant
    • NSF CNS-1012748
    • NSF IIS-0915054 and NSF CCF-1047815

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