AI Governance Engineer
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Differential privacy

By Updated

A mathematical guarantee that bounds how much any single person's record can change the output of an analysis or a trained model, tuned by a privacy budget. Its strength depends on the budget and on implementation choices that NIST calls privacy hazards 1.

Developed in
ch. 19, Privacy-enhancing technologies and their honest limits
Chapters
ch. 19, Privacy & AI
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

3 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Differential privacy: mentions per chapter5 mentions of the term across 3 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapterOther chapter10 Reading List: 2 mentions10 Reading List214 Development: 1 mention14 Development119 Privacy & AI: 2 mentions19 Privacy & AI2No mentions in the other 20 chaptersSource: the Body of Knowledgev0.5.0
Differential privacy: mentions per chapter5 mentions of the term across 3 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapterOther chapter00010203040506070810 Reading List: 2 mentions21011121314 Development: 1 mention1141516171819 Privacy & AI: 2 mentions21920212223Source: the Body of Knowledge v0.5.0
Mentions per chapter How often each chapter names the term, with the chapters the glossary cross-references drawn solid. The longest bar is where to read the term in use; bars spread across many chapters mark a term that runs through the discipline.
Mentions as a table
Mentions of Differential privacy per chapter
ChapterMentionsCross-referenced
00 Preface0No
01 Definition0No
02 Why Now0No
03 Values & Principles0No
04 The Stack0No
05 Patterns0No
06 The Role0No
07 Maturity Model0No
08 Regulatory Map0No
10 Reading List2No
11 AI Defined0No
12 Governance Program0No
13 Risk Management0No
14 Development1No
15 Deployment0No
16 Fairness & XAI0No
17 Incidents0No
18 EU AI Act0No
19 Privacy & AI2Yes
20 Existing Law0No
21 AI Laws Worldwide0No
22 Principles & Standards0No
23 AI Agents0No
  • Federated learning

    Training a model across devices or sites where the data lives, sharing model updates instead of raw records.

  • Privacy-enhancing technology (PET)

    A technique that reduces what an attacker, vendor or insider can learn from personal data, such as differential privacy, federated learning, synthetic data…

Sources

  1. [1] NIST SP 800-226, Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees (differential privacy pyramid; privacy hazards). NIST. 2025-03. https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/226/final (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Differential privacy. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/differential-privacy. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026differentialprivacy,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Differential privacy}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/differential-privacy}
}