Limits of Personalizing Differential Privacy Budgets
A key technical difficulty in differential privacy is selecting a privacy budget that satisfies privacy requirements while maximizing utility. A natural and well-studied workaround is to use personalized privacy budgets, which may differ across agents. In this paper, we show that personalized budgets come with major limitations and that for mean estimation, the dominant factor is not full personalization, but rather choosing the right effective privacy budget. This can be achieved through a simple thresholding operator that we describe. Compared with this thresholding baseline, the gains obtained by fully personalized mechanisms are limited. In particular, we precisely quantify the consta...
| Authors | Edwige Cyffers, Juba Ziani |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 13 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 May 2026 |
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