Interactive Demo

Differential Privacy & Federated Learning

A Visual Journey Through Differential Privacy

An eight-act interactive explainer that traces the evolution of privacy-enhancing technology — from Latanya Sweeney's 1997 re-identification attack on Governor Weld, through the failure of k-anonymity, to the 2006 differential privacy revolution and its ethical costs. Four live interactive elements let you watch a linkage attack succeed, generalize a dataset under k-anonymity, manipulate the epsilon dial, and see minority communities vanish under heavy noise.

differential-privacy-explainer.html

Course Context

  • Unit 8: Privacy-Enhancing and Security Technologies
  • Presentation: 17 (Week 11, April 6, 2026)
  • Key Concepts: linkage attacks, k-anonymity, generalization & suppression, the homogeneity attack, the Laplace mechanism, the privacy budget ε, minority erasure, privacy theater
  • Interactive Elements: live linkage attack (Act II), k-anonymity transformation with homogeneity reveal (Act III), epsilon slider with frosted-glass histogram (Act IV), minority erasure visualization (Act VI)
  • Source: narrative structure adapted from the Rapid Synthesis / NotebookLM podcast Privacy Tech Evolution: From k-Anonymity to Differential Privacy