Perspective: Better Privacy Theorists for Better Data Stewards

Abstract

The U.S. Census Bureau's use of differential privacy (DP) fundamentally changed how academic DP researchers perform outreach with official statistics stakeholders. In this perspectives piece, I propose ways for us in this community to improve those processes by being more receptive to the practical concerns raised by building DP systems. First, I discuss how academic DP work fundamentally differs from the policy decisions needed to implement DP systems and why this distinction has political consequences. Through examples and discussions from workshops, I show how the DP community largely asked applied stakeholders to communicate on DP's theoretical terms, when such an ask foreclosed important considerations relevant for the Census Bureau's policy problems. Second, I discuss how existing polarization between theoretical and empirical privacy researchers unintentionally seeped into the ways we communicated about DP, pointing to why both perspectives are necessary in different ways for policy conversations. Finally, I conclude by discussing how these issues are not unique to data privacy work, but instead reflect structural problems in translating theoretical science into practice. These ideas are presented in service of a single goal: to ensure DP theory supports substantive, privacy-aware data processing and dissemination in practice for essential data curators.