# Maximal Information Leakage based Privacy Preserving Data Disclosure Mechanisms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01147 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01147/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Bottlenecks CLUB: Unifying Information-Theoretic Trade-offs Among Complexity, Leakage, and Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04895/) (2022)
- [Measuring What Matters: Connecting AI Ethics Evaluations to System Attributes, Hazards, and Harms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10339/) (2025)
- [Deep Privacy Funnel Model: From a Discriminative to a Generative Approach with an Application to Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02696/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is often necessary to disclose training data to the public domain, while protecting privacy of certain sensitive labels. We use information theoretic measures to develop such privacy preserving data disclosure mechanisms. Our mechanism involves perturbing the data vectors in a manner that strikes a balance in the privacy-utility trade-off. We use maximal information leakage between the output data vector and the confidential label as our privacy metric. We first study the theoretical Bernoulli-Gaussian model and study the privacy-utility trade-off when only the mean of the Gaussian distributions can be perturbed. We show that the optimal solution is the same as the case when the utility is measured using probability of error at the adversary. We then consider an application of this framework to a data driven setting and provide an empirical approximation to the Sibson mutual information. By performing experiments on the MNIST and FERG data-sets, we show that our proposed framework achieves equivalent or better privacy than previous methods based on mutual information.