Equity and Privacy: More Than Just a Tradeoff

Organizations large and small collect information about individuals and groups and then want to share insights from this data to inform research and policy making. For instance, hospitals release deidentified data to innovate on disease detection and mitigation. Internet companies train and release machine learning (ML) models as a service for a variety of classification tasks. Government agencies distribute statistical data to enable research and policy making. However, releasing data, even in “anonymous” or aggregated form, creates vulnerabilities to privacy attacks that can result in individuals’ sensitive details being revealed.