Our goal is to integrate the definitions and algorithmic tools from differential privacy into several IQSS projects for sharing and exploring research data, especially the widely-used Dataverse platform. Related projects that we are incorporating differential privacy into include DataTags, TwoRavens, and Zelig.

The Dataverse project is a software infrastructure used for hosting data repositories around the world, enabling researchers to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. Our goal is to augment Dataverse to enable differentially private access to sensitive datasets that currently cannot be safely shared. What makes this particularly challenging (compared to many other practical applications of differential privacy) is that the tools need to be general purpose, applying to a wide variety of datasets uploaded to Dataverse repositories, and automated, with no differential privacy expert optimizing the algorithms for each dataset or analyst. Consequently, we envision that the differentially private access we provide will allow researchers to perform rough preliminary analyses that help determine whether it is worth the effort to apply for access to the raw data.

DataTags is a PrivacyTools project that generates guidelines for how dataset holders should share their data in compliance with the relevant privacy laws and regulations. To use the tool, a dataset holder engages with an automated interview process, which produces a "Data Tag" telling the user how the data can be shared, how it can be stored, etc. We are working to incorporate differential privacy into these tags, especially to enable sharing of data where the current tags do not allow for public release. For instance, we are assessing the protection guaranteed by various settings of the differential privacy parameters (epsilon and delta) so that we can make recommendations for which parameters are appropriate for each level of tag.

Zelig is a user-friendly package built on R for performing statistical methods and interpreting and presenting the results. TwoRavens, integrated with Zelig and Dataverse, is a browser-based tool for exploring and analyzing data. We are working towards creating differentially private versions of the core functionalities of these projects.