Archive for adversarial strategy

persuasive (and Oceanic) privacy

Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 3, 2026 by xi'an

I am quite excited about the paper James Baillie, Joshua Bon, Judith Rousseau, and myself just arXived! A novel framework for measuring privacy we have been working on for at least the past year, partly through the previous Les Houches privacy workshops. In the spirit of these workshops and the larger scale ERC Synergy grant OCEAN, we develop therein a rather generic Bayesian game-theoretic perspective on achieving statistical privacy. It involves a Sender (observing the original data and delivering a limited output) and a Receiver (with potential adversarial intentions). The paper mostly focus on setting a theoretical framework, including the creation of new, purpose-driven privacy definitions that are rigorously justified, while also allowing for the assessment of existing privacy guarantees through game theory. While this was not our original intent, we show that pure and probabilistic differential privacy notions, in the Dwork et al. (2006) sense, are special cases of our framework. This setting provides new interpretations of the post-processing inequality. Furthermore, and somewhat more importantly, we also prove that our privacy guarantees can be established for deterministic algorithms, which are outside current privacy standards. Hopefully, we’ll make further progress at the incoming privacy workshop next month, to be held in Venice (again).

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