PrivApprox: Privacy-Preserving Stream Analytics

How to preserve users’ privacy while supporting high-utility analytics for low-latency stream processing?

To answer this question: we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of PRIVAPPROX, a data analytics system for privacy-preserving stream processing. PRIVAPPROX provides three important properties: (i) Privacy: zero-knowledge privacy guarantee for users, a privacy bound tighter than the state-of-the-art differential privacy; (ii) Utility: an interface for data analysts to systematically explore the trade-offs between the output accuracy (with error estimation) and the query execution budget; (iii) Latency: near real-time stream processing based on a scalable “synchronization-free” distributed architecture.

The key idea behind our approach is to marry two techniques together, namely, sampling (used for approximate computation) and randomized response (used for privacy-preserving analytics). The resulting marriage is complementary—it achieves stronger privacy guarantees, and also improves the performance for stream analytics.