Context Aware Laplacian Mechanism for Local Information Privacy

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing additive noise mechanisms for data release subject to a local information privacy constraint. While there has been significant prior work on devising additive noise mechanisms for differential privacy (such as Laplacian and Gaussian mechanisms), for the notion of information privacy, which accounts for prior-knowledge about the data, there are no such general purpose additive noise mechanisms. To this end, we devise a prior-aware Laplacian noise mechanism, which satisfies local information privacy. We show that adding context awareness (i.e., via the knowledge of prior of the data) improves the tradeoff between utility and privacy when compared to context-unaware mechanisms.