Disentangling private classes through regularization

Abstract

Deep learning models are nowadays broadly deployed to solve an incredibly large variety of tasks. However, little attention has been devoted to connected legal aspects. In 2016, the European Union approved the General Data Protection Regulation which entered into force in 2018. Its main rationale was to protect the privacy and data protection of its citizens by the way of operating the so-called “Data Economy”. As data is the fuel of modern Artificial Intelligence, it is argued that the GDPR can be partly applicable to a series of algorithmic decision-making tasks before a more structured AI Regulation enters into force. In the meantime, AI should not allow undesired information leakage deviating from the purpose for which is created. In this work, we propose DisP, an approach for deep learning models disentangling the information related to some classes we desire to keep private, from the data processed by AI. In particular, DisP is a regularization strategy de-correlating the features belonging to the same private class at training time, hiding the information about private class membership. Our experiments on state-of-the-art deep learning models show the effectiveness of DisP, minimizing the risk of extraction for the classes we desire to keep private.