AIExplainer
Ethics & Safety Mathematics Intermediate 1 min read

What is a differential privacy?

In machine learning, an anonymization approach to protect any sensitive data (for example, an individual's personal information) included in a model's training set from being exposed.

In machine learning, an anonymization approach to protect any sensitive data (for example, an individual's personal information) included in a model's training set from being exposed. This approach ensures that the model doesn't learn or remember much about a specific individual. This is accomplished by sampling and adding noise during model training to obscure individual data points, mitigating the risk of exposing sensitive training data. Differential privacy is also used outside of machine learning. For example, data scientists sometimes use differential privacy to protect individual privacy when computing product usage statistics for different demographics.

Practitioners refer to differential privacy when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.