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Do you believe an opt-in in necessary with a (properly implemented) differentially private collection mechanism? Just curious about your take on this.



I think that is the ethical thing to do, yes.

Differential privacy does statistically disclose information about you, and whether the quantitative bound used is up to your standards is a decision you should make before it happens. Given that user-level understanding of DP is so low, I don't think defaulting people in to levels chosen by others is a good idea. I 100% guarantee Mozilla doesn't have the background to make this choice responsibly, and doesn't have near the DP expertise the RAPPOR team has / had (who I also wouldn't trust to chose things for me).

Ideally, the use of differential privacy would make you more willing to opt in (when you have a choice) rather than being a smokescreen for organizations that simply want to harvest more data (which was Mozilla's stated motivation).

Edit: fwiw, there are some cool "recent" versions of differential privacy that let the users control the amount of privacy loss on a user-by-user basis. So, you could start at 0 and dial it up as you feel more comfortable with the tech. This incentivizes organizations to be more transparent with what they do, as it (in principle) increases turnout.

Edit2: For context, Apple's "default" values appear to be (from this paper) epsilon = 16 * days. That means that each day you are active, the posterior probability someone has about any fact about you can increase by a factor of exp(16) ~= 88 million. So, numbers matter and I am (i) glad Apple made it opt-in, (ii) super disappointed they aren't at all transparent about how it works, and (iii) thankful that the paper authors are doing this work.


And it seems that the "default" values will be increasing further in iOS 11 -- to 43 * days.




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