No Free Lunch in Data Privacy

Summary: No free lunch: a no-free-lunch theorem shows DP privacy-utility requires data-generation assumptions. Privacy hinges on limiting inference about an individual's participation, not mere tuple presence; DP can breach participation in social networks and tabular data without modeling assumptions. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4444
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 0.00011572271
Overall Rank: 1,230 | 91.57%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989345

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Daniel Kifer (Pennsylvania State University)
2. Ashwin Machanavajjhala (Yahoo)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{kifer_sigmod11,
        title = {{No Free Lunch in Data Privacy}},
        author = {Kifer, Daniel and Machanavajjhala, Ashwin},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989345},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989345},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 25 of 25 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
281	Towards Practical Differential Privacy for SQL Queries	2018	VLDB	0.00022445849
836	Recursive Mechanism: Towards Node Differential Privacy and Unrestricted Joins	2013	SIGMOD	0.00013715654
1,790	Publishing Graph Degree Distribution with Node Differential Privacy	2016	SIGMOD	9.7502278e-05
2,562	Blowfish Privacy: Tuning Privacy-Utility Trade-offs using Policies	2014	SIGMOD	8.4127196e-05
3,016	Plausible Deniability for Privacy-Preserving Data Synthesis	2017	VLDB	7.8484858e-05
3,375	Bayesian Differential Privacy on Correlated Data	2015	SIGMOD	7.4639817e-05
4,881	Utility Cost of Formal Privacy for Releasing National Employer-Employee Statistics	2017	SIGMOD	6.465615e-05
4,930	IncShrink: Architecting Efficient Outsourced Databases using Incremental MPC and Differential Privacy	2022	SIGMOD	6.4402718e-05
5,027	A Rigorous and Customizable Framework for Privacy	2012	PODS	6.3969504e-05
5,613	Differential Privacy in the Wild: A Tutorial on Current Practices & Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	6.1501263e-05
6,304	Privacy-Aware Data Management in Information Networks	2011	SIGMOD	5.9210809e-05
6,370	Differential Privacy in the Wild: A tutorial on current practices & open challenges	2016	VLDB	5.8973335e-05
6,441	Differential Privacy in Data Publication and Analysis	2012	SIGMOD	5.8779245e-05
6,666	Residual Sensitivity for Differentially Private Multi-Way Joins	2021	SIGMOD	5.8086805e-05
6,772	PrivGene: Differentially Private Model Fitting Using Genetic Algorithms	2013	SIGMOD	5.7782652e-05
7,292	A Nearly Instance-optimal Differentially Private Mechanism for Conjunctive Queries	2022	PODS	5.653597e-05
7,500	Approximate DBSCAN under Differential Privacy	2025	SIGMOD	5.6029996e-05
7,850	Differentially Private Data Release over Multiple Tables	2023	PODS	5.5316993e-05
8,311	DP-Sync: Hiding Update Patterns in Secure Outsourced Databases with Differential Privacy	2021	SIGMOD	5.4556836e-05
9,839	Sypse: Privacy-first Data Management through Pseudonymization and Partitioning	2021	CIDR	5.2103651e-05
10,442	Defense against Poisoning Attacks under Shuffle-DP	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,803	SPECIAL: SynoPsis AssistEd Secure CollaboratIve AnaLytics	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,914	Calibrating Noise for Group Privacy in Subsampled Mechanisms	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,964	Balancing Privacy and Utility in Correlated Data: A Study of Bayesian Differential Privacy	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,326	Publishing Microdata with a Robust Privacy Guarantee	2012	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
123	Revealing Information while Preserving Privacy	2003	PODS	0.00031082693
510	Practical Privacy: The SuLQ Framework	2005	PODS	0.00017220509
855	Relationship Privacy: Output Perturbation for Queries with Joins	2009	PODS	0.00013579513
4,407	Towards an Axiomatization of Statistical Privacy and Utility	2010	PODS	6.719141e-05

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