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Re:Docusign just admitted that they use customer data to tra... by Der_Einzige on Friday March 01, 2024 @12:50AM (#39558939)
What happened to differential privacy?
Re:Docusign just admitted that they use customer data to tra... by nl on Friday March 01, 2024 @01:23AM (#39559109)
It works.

But understand what you are doing: you are adding noise to individual's data to make them less identifiable within a specified set of data. The amount of noise you need to add depends on the size of the set they are within.

The OP is also right: For arbitrary customer data (within arbitrary sets of data) you can't guarantee anonymization.

There are also multi-party computation systems, homomorphic encryption and federated learning approaches that all provide different approaches for parts of the private machine learning problem.

It's hard.

Re:Docusign just admitted that they use customer data to tra... by bigiain on Friday March 01, 2024 @01:32AM (#39559154)
Worth investigation "k-anonymity" as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity

k-anonymity is an attempt to solve the problem "Given person-specific field-structured data, produce a release of the data with scientific guarantees that the individuals who are the subjects of the data cannot be re-identified while the data remain practically useful."

One serious problem with that approach is that no matter how well you k-anonymise your data set, someone else's dataset may deanonymise yours.

Re:Docusign just admitted that they use customer data to tra... by saulrh on Friday March 01, 2024 @01:20AM (#39559087)
It doesn't work on arbitrary data. Hand-crafted metrics on structured data, yeah. Free text, no. Data that you don't know anything about, also not really.