Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.

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Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response, or RAPPOR, is a technology for crowdsourcing statistics from end-user client software, anonymously, with strong privacy guarantees. In short, RAPPORs allow the forest of client data to be studied, without permitting the possibility of looking at individual trees. By applying randomized response in a novel manner, RAPPOR provides the mechanisms for such collection as well as for efficient, high-utility analysis of the collected data. In particular, RAPPOR permits statistics to be collected on the population of client-side strings with strong privacy guarantees for each client, and without linkability of their reports.This paper describes and motivates RAPPOR, details its differential-privacy and utility guarantees, discusses its practical deployment and properties in the face of different attack models, and, finally, gives results of its application to both synthetic and real-world data.

With the recent surge of social networks such as Facebook, new forms of recommendations have become possible -- recommendations that rely on one's social connections in order to make personalized recommendations of ads, content, products, and people. Since recommendations may use sensitive information, it is speculated that these recommendations are associated with privacy risks. The main contribution of this work is in formalizing trade-offs between accuracy and privacy of personalized social recommendations. We study whether "social recommendations", or recommendations that are solely based on a user's social network, can be made without disclosing sensitive links in the social graph. More precisely, we quantify the loss in utility when existing recommendation algorithms are modified to satisfy a strong notion of privacy, called differential privacy. We prove lower bounds on the minimum loss in utility for any recommendation algorithm that is differentially private. We then adapt two privacy preserving algorithms from the differential privacy literature to the problem of social recommendations, and analyze their performance in comparison to our lower bounds, both analytically and experimentally. We show that good private social recommendations are feasible only for a small subset of the users in the social network or for a lenient setting of privacy parameters.

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