A new paper, Valuation of Differential Privacy Budget in Data Trade: A Conjoint Analysis, by Michael Khavkin and Eran Toch was published in the Privacy and Identity Management IFIP Proceedings!

In the article, we analyze the decision-making process of people who requested to share their data with a data processor for analysis purposes with strict privacy protection called differential privacy in exchange for payment.

Our purpose was to find the connection between different factors that may help data processors better tune the level of differential privacy protection. Our analysis is based on a survey among people from the U.S. (n=139), in which people were requested to select their preferred scenario from a set of alternatives under which they would share their data. Each scenario was described by several properties, such as what sensitive data is shared, how long it is retained by the data processor and for what purpose, and the level of guaranteed differential privacy.

We concluded that people assigned higher importance to their profit and the purpose for which their data is processed rather than what data is shared. They also preferred scenarios with higher differential privacy protection for indefinitely-retained data for profit generation than for temporarily-retained data for non-commercial purposes.