ABSTRACT
During the Vietnam war, American generals wanted to determine the proportion of soldiers that were smoking marijuana. The trouble is that if a superior directly asks a soldier whether he smokes, then the soldier will likely answer no to avoid any punishment. World War II and technological progress led to the mechanization of cryptography. Some of the most important war machines used by the Nazis were not killing machines, but encoding and decoding machines. Cynthia Dwork’s differential privacy is a very general criterion to identify the methods that offer provable privacy guarantees. As in the case of the randomized survey, suppose one wish to extract useful information from individuals’ data. More formally and without loss of generality, Dwork supposed that surveyed individuals’ data are located in some database. According to Dwork, it’s the differential privacy of this database that needs to be guaranteed.
