Privacy-Constrained Signals

Abstract

This paper provides a unified approach to characterize the set of all feasible signals subject to privacy constraints. The Blackwell frontier of feasible signals can be decomposed into minimum informative signals achieving the Blackwell frontier of privacy variables, and conditionally privacy-preserving signals. A complete characterization of the minimum informative signals is then provided. We apply the framework to ex-post privacy (including differential and inferential privacy) and to constraints on posterior means of arbitrary statistics.