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- Faculty Publications (109)
privacy
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- Article
Oracle Efficient Private Non-Convex Optimization
By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Giuseppe Vietri and Zhiwei Steven Wu
One of the most effective algorithms for differentially private learning and optimization is objective perturbation. This technique augments a given optimization problem (e.g. deriving from an ERM problem) with a random linear term, and then exactly solves it.... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Sizmek Chapter 11: Surviving Walled Gardens in Their Ad Tech Empire
By: Ayelet Israeli, Danilo Tauro and Sarah Gulick
This case provides a post-mortem of the advertising technology (adtech) company Sizmek. Sizmek grew via multiple acquisitions, with the vision of becoming an integrated adtech company that could leverage AI to buy digital media, while creating and serving display and... View Details
- Mar 2020
- Conference Presentation
A New Analysis of Differential Privacy's Generalization Guarantees
By: Christopher Jung, Katrina Ligett, Seth Neel, Aaron Roth, Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi and Moshe Shenfeld
We give a new proof of the "transfer theorem" underlying adaptive data analysis: that any mechanism for answering adaptively chosen statistical queries that is differentially private and sample-accurate is also accurate out-of-sample. Our new proof is elementary and... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
Tales of Two Motives: Disclosure and Concealment
By: Leslie John, Michael L. Slepian and Diana Tamir
We posit that the desire to disclose personal information, and the desire to conceal it, are related yet distinct psychological motives. People often wish to conceal information, such as embarrassing aspects of the self. Yet people also seek to reveal information, such... View Details
- Article
How to Use Heuristics for Differential Privacy
By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu
We develop theory for using heuristics to solve computationally hard problems in differential privacy. Heuristic approaches have enjoyed tremendous success in machine learning, for which performance can be empirically evaluated. However, privacy guarantees cannot be... View Details
- Article
The Role of Interactivity in Local Differential Privacy
By: Matthew Joseph, Jieming Mao, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
We study the power of interactivity in local differential privacy. First, we focus on the difference between fully interactive and sequentially interactive protocols. Sequentially interactive protocols may query users adaptively in sequence, but they cannot return to... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Internet Interconnection
By: Ran Zhuo, Bradley Huffaker, KC Claffy and Shane Greenstein
The Internet comprises thousands of independently operated networks, where bilaterally negotiated interconnection agreements determine the flow of data between networks. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict restrictions on... View Details
- October 2019 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Fixing Facebook: Fake News, Privacy, and Platform Governance
By: David Yoffie and Daniel Fisher
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook based on the idea that connecting people was a fundamentally good thing—and a way to turn a handsome profit. But from the beginning, Facebook received criticism both for how it handled user privacy and how it curated user-generated... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Teaching Note
Sidewalk Labs: Privacy in a City Built from the Internet Up
By: Leslie John and Mitch Weiss
Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.
The case serves as a microcosm of issues of digital privacy: the availability of data – personal data in particular – has tremendous potential to improve people’s lives... View Details
The case serves as a microcosm of issues of digital privacy: the availability of data – personal data in particular – has tremendous potential to improve people’s lives... View Details
- Article
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness
By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie K. John
Given the increasingly specific ways marketers can target ads, many consumers and regulators are demanding ad transparency: disclosure of how consumers’ personal information was used to generate ads. We investigate how and why ad transparency impacts ad effectiveness.... View Details
- January 2019
- Case
Data.gov (Abridged)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi
This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to... View Details
- Article
Accuracy First: Selecting a Differential Privacy Level for Accuracy-Constrained ERM
By: Katrina Ligett, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Bo Waggoner and Steven Wu
Traditional approaches to differential privacy assume a fixed privacy requirement ϵ for a computation, and attempt to maximize the accuracy of the computation subject to the privacy constraint. As differential privacy is increasingly deployed in practical settings, it... View Details
- 2019
- Article
Big Data
By: John A. Deighton
Big data is defined and distinguished from a mere moment in the “ancient quest to measure.” Specific discontinuities in the practice of information science are identified that, the paper argues, have large consequences for the social order. The infrastructure that runs... View Details
- October 2018 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Sidewalk Labs: Privacy in a City Built from the Internet Up
By: Leslie K. John, Mitchell Weiss and Julia Kelley
Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.
By the time Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, began hosting a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in January 2018, he had only nine months remaining to convince the people... View Details
By the time Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, began hosting a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in January 2018, he had only nine months remaining to convince the people... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Govtech; CivicTech; Smart Cities; City Innovation; Government Innovation; Privacy; Sidewalk Labs; Dan Doctoroff; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Consumer Behavior; Governance; Business and Government Relations; Innovation and Invention; Technology Industry; Public Administration Industry; Transportation Industry; Real Estate Industry; Canada
- October 2018
- Case
Fundraising at St. Camillus Hospital
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
St. Camillus is a fictional non-profit hospital in rural Maine facing a serious budget deficit. As Director of Marketing, Victoria Stern is building a team to modernize the hospital fundraising efforts. An interview with a promising candidate, who is also a digital... View Details
- Article
Uninformed Consent
By: Leslie K. John
Companies want access to more and more of your personal data—from where you are to what’s in your DNA. Can they unlock its value while respecting consumers’ privacy? View Details
- September 2018
- Article
When and Why Randomized Response Techniques (Fail to) Elicit the Truth
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein, Alessandro Acquisti and Joachim Vosgerau
By adding random noise to individual responses, randomized response techniques (RRTs) are intended to enhance privacy protection and encourage honest disclosure of sensitive information. Empirical findings on their success in doing so are, however, mixed. In nine... View Details
Keywords: Truth-telling; Lying; Privacy; Information Disclosure; Survey Research; Surveys; Attitudes; Behavior
- August 2018 (Revised April 2023)
- Case
Facebook—Can Ethics Scale in the Digital Age?
By: George A. Riedel and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has built a phenomenally successful business at global scale to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world. The revelation of Cambridge Analytica events in March 2018, where 78 million users' information was leaked... View Details
- July 2018
- Article
Reimagining Health Data Exchange: An Application Programming Interface-Enabled Roadmap for India
By: Satchit Balsari, Alexander Fortenko MD, MPH, Joaquin A. Blaya PhD, Adrian Gropper MD, Malavika Jayaram LLM, Rahul Matthan LLM, Ram Sahasranam, Mark Shankar MD, Suptendra N. Sarbadhikari PhD, Barbara Bierer, Kenneth D. Mandl MD, Sanjay Mehendale MD, MPH and Tarun Khanna
In February 2018, the Government of India announced a massive public health insurance scheme extending coverage to 500 million citizens, in effect making it the world’s largest insurance program. To meet this target, the government will rely on technology to... View Details