Pith Number

pith:7E4SAUQU

pith:2026:7E4SAUQUWX4C54GGLV54UD5WO2

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Limits of Personalizing Differential Privacy Budgets

Edwige Cyffers, Juba Ziani

For mean estimation, a simple thresholding operator on privacy budgets captures nearly all the utility gains of full personalization.

arxiv:2605.13503 v1 · 2026-05-13 · cs.CR · cs.LG

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\pithnumber{7E4SAUQUWX4C54GGLV54UD5WO2}

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

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.

C2weakest assumption

The analysis assumes standard additive-noise mechanisms for mean estimation and specific distributions of privacy requirements (mixed public-private or two-level), which may not capture all real-world data distributions or query types.

C3one line summary

For mean estimation, a simple thresholding operator on privacy budgets matches the performance of fully personalized differential privacy mechanisms up to constant factors.

References

32 extracted · 32 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] Personalized differential privacy for ridge regression under output perturbation.Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 73(4):525–537, 2026 2026

[2] Heterogeneous Differential Privacy 2015 · arXiv:1504.06998

[3] Anita Allen.Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide?OUP Usa, New York, US, 2011 2011

[4] Limits of private learning with access to public data 2019

[5] Data sharing with endogenous choices over differential privacy levels.arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.09357, 2026 2026

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T02:44:24.679687Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

f939205214b5f82ef0c65d7bca0fb67683b20eddb91c3e3a0a548738d8d9a838

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.13503 · arxiv_version: 2605.13503v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.13503 · pith_short_12: 7E4SAUQUWX4C · pith_short_16: 7E4SAUQUWX4C54GG · pith_short_8: 7E4SAUQU

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/7E4SAUQUWX4C54GGLV54UD5WO2 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: f939205214b5f82ef0c65d7bca0fb67683b20eddb91c3e3a0a548738d8d9a838

Canonical record JSON

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    "abstract_canon_sha256": "fcf1184f847c48392a63f53a6df34186f76141a98cfd3aed84ff4e6c10ee00e4",
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    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CR",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-13T13:24:50Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "5402e9232e9fdde72d70265f1467fa2154c194216ec96f09d852b60989b76816"
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