Privacy Utility Tradeoff Between PETs: Differential Privacy and Synthetic Data

Data privacy is a critical concern in the digital age. This problem has compounded with the evolution and increased adoption of machine learning (ML), which has necessitated balancing the security of sensitive information with model utility. Traditional data privacy techniques, such as differential privacy and anonymization, focus on protecting data at rest and in transit but often fail to maintain high utility for machine learning models due to their impact on data accuracy. In this article, we explore the use of synthetic data as a privacy-preserving method that can effectively balance data privacy and utility. Synthetic data is generated to replicate the statistical properties of the original dataset while obscuring identifying details, offering enhanced privacy guarantees. We evaluate the performance of synthetic data against differentially private and anonymized data in terms of prediction accuracy across various settings—different learning rates, network architectures, and datasets from various domains. Our findings demonstrate that synthetic data maintains higher utility (prediction accuracy) than differentially private and anonymized data. The study underscores the potential of synthetic data as a robust privacy-enhancing technology (PET) capable of preserving both privacy and data utility in machine learning environments.