Abstract

Over the past several decades, there has been a cat-and-mouse game played between data protectors of and data users.  It seems as though every time a new model of data privacy is posited, a new attack is published along with high-profile demonstrations of its failure to guarantee protection.  This has, upon many occasions, led to outcries about how privacy is either dead, is dying, or was a mere myth and never existed in the first place.  The goal of this talk is to review how we got to this juncture in time and suggest that data privacy may not only be dead, but that our technical definitions of the problem may require an augmentation to account for real world adversarial settings.  In doing so, I will introduce a new direction in privacy, which is rooted in a formal game theoretic framework and will provide examples of how this view can provide for greater flexibility with respect to several classic privacy problems, including the publication of individual-level records and summary statistics.