Papers › TAPAS: a Toolbox for Adversarial Privacy Auditing of Synthetic Data

TAPAS: a Toolbox for Adversarial Privacy Auditing of Synthetic Data

12 Nov 2022arXiv:2211.06550archive 2025-07-28

Florimond Houssiau, James Jordon, Samuel N. Cohen, Owen Daniel, Andrew Elliott, James Geddes, Callum Mole, Camila Rangel-Smith, Lukasz Szpruch

Personal data collected at scale promises to improve decision-making and accelerate innovation. However, sharing and using such data raises serious privacy concerns. A promising solution is to produce synthetic data, artificial records to share instead of real data. Since synthetic records are not linked to real persons, this intuitively prevents classical re-identification attacks. However, this is insufficient to protect privacy. We here present TAPAS, a toolbox of attacks to evaluate synthetic data privacy under a wide range of scenarios. These attacks include generalizations of prior works and novel attacks. We also introduce a general framework for reasoning about privacy threats to synthetic data and showcase TAPAS on several examples.

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