Differential Privacy

Differential privacy is a mathematical framework for releasing statistical information about a dataset while providing rigorous guarantees that individual records cannot be identified or inferred. Introduced by Cynthia Dwork in 2006, it formalizes privacy as a probabilistic bound: any single individual's presence or absence in the dataset changes the output distribution by at most a multiplicative factor of e^ε, where ε is the privacy budget controlling the privacy–utility tradeoff.