Re: [docs-and-reports] Principle: Don't use Entropy (#4)

I'm not exactly proposing in the positive, but more in the negative :)  That is, entropy provides some insight, but it isn't a very useful one unless you understand what it is really saying.

You might also interpret this as a bit of a repudiation of your notion of "at-scale privacy".  Sure, there is something to be said for providing protection to people in larger groups and using aggregate measures as the basis for making claims about those groups.  However, I'm asserting that anything you say about a population as a whole is not worth much if it means that there are individuals or minorities that might suffer disproportionately as a result.

That is, saying that the average person is affected in a certain way is far less compelling than being able to say that all people are affected in a certain way.

The sorts of things that might be useful is knowing how often someone is identifiable as being in a group of size less than $k$ for $k\in \\{1,10, 100, \dots\\}$ for example.  Or how many people might reveal information that exceeds some threshold $h$.  That might not suffice, in that those sorts of statistics depend on assumptions about populations and selection, but they do provide more direct insight into the effect on privacy.

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Received on Friday, 17 June 2022 02:25:44 UTC