Speaker: Harry McArthur
University of Melbourne

Title: On Privacy—Utility Trade-offs with Synthetic Data Under Reconstruction Attacks

Summary:
We study how statistical agencies can publish useful population data while protecting individual privacy. Many real-world systems, like those used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, achieve this goal by adding independent, bounded random noise to published tables prior to publication—but these methods remain vulnerable to reconstruction attacks that can reveal sensitive information. We consider an alternative approach based on synthetic data generation, which perturbs the underlying database itself rather than the published statistics. We show that this approach can provide better privacy—trade-offs when releasing large volumes of statistical information.

Bio:
Harry is an OPTIMA industry PhD student working jointly with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, supervised by Kate Smith-Miles and Peter Taylor.

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This event is Hybrid:
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REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND IN PERSON: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/pfj2
Please arrive early to find the location and find a seat
Level 1, Alison Hartcourt Seminar room 162, Peter Hall Building, University of Melbourne, 813 Swanston St, Parkville, 3053 (near corner of Swanston St/Monash Rd, Melbourne Uni tram stop 1)
This is a 4min walk from Melbourne Connect in the main Melbourne University campus (see google map)

SEMINAR: WED 11 MARCH 2026 16:00-17:00 (AEDT, Melbourne Time)