It has long been known that "anonymized" bulk data sets can reveal information about individuals, especially when multiple data sets are cross-referenced together. With increasing concern over personal privacy, some companies—including Apple and Google—are turning to differential privacy techniques in order to improve individual privacy while retaining the ability to perform useful analytics on large numbers of users. Differential privacy is a cryptographic technique that attempts to maximize the accuracy of statistical queries from a database while minimizing the chances of identifying its records. These results can be achieved by introducing a low amount of "noise" to the data, but it's important to note that this is an ongoing research area. Apple has announced plans to incorporate differential privacy into its products—and we wholeheartedly applaud its commitment to customers' privacy—but the usual Apple secrecy has left some security experts scratching their heads. We continue to recommend Datensparsamkeit as an alternative approach: simply storing the minimum data you actually need will achieve better privacy results in most cases.

It has long been known that "anonymized" bulk data sets can reveal information about individuals, especially when multiple data sets are cross-referenced together. With increasing concern over personal privacy, some companies—including Apple and Google—are turning to differential privacy techniques in order to improve individual privacy while retaining the ability to perform useful analytics on large numbers of users. Differential privacy is a cryptographic technique that attempts to maximize the accuracy of statistical queries from a database while minimizing the chances of identifying its records. These results can be achieved by introducing a low amount of "noise" to the data, but it’s important to note that this is an ongoing research area. Apple has announced plans to incorporate differential privacy into its products—and we wholeheartedly applaud its commitment to customers' privacy—but the usual Apple secrecy has left some security experts scratching their heads. We continue to recommend Datensparsamkeit as an alternative approach: simply storing the minimum data you actually need will achieve better privacy results in most cases.