Event Date
SPEAKER: Nitin Kohli, Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley School of Information
TITLE: Enabling Humanitarian Applications with Targeted Differential Privacy
ABSTRACT: The proliferation of mobile phones in developing countries has suddenly and dramatically increased the extent to which the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations can be observed and tracked by governments and corporations. Millions of historically “off the grid” individuals are now passively generating digital data; these data, in turn, are being used to make life-altering decisions about those individuals – including whether or not they receive government benefits, and if they can qualify for a consumer loan. This talk develops and tests a novel approach to implementing decisions based on private personal data, which provides formal privacy guarantees while also enabling common downstream applications. The approach generalizes differential privacy to applications that require decisions about individuals, and gives decisionmakers granular control over the level of privacy guaranteed to subjects. We show that stronger privacy guarantees typically come at some cost, and use data from two real-world applications – an anti-poverty program in Togo and a consumer lending platform in Nigeria – to illustrate those costs. Our empirical results characterize the tradeoff between privacy and predictive accuracy, and illustrate how different privacy guarantees impact overall program effectiveness. More broadly, our results demonstrate a way for humanitarian programs to responsibly use personal data, and better equip program designers to make informed decisions about data privacy.
SPEAKER'S WEBSITE (links to UC Berkeley): https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/nitin-kohli
Seminar Date/Time: Thursday November 30, 2023, 4:10pm
Location: MSB 1147, Refreshments: 3:30pm