United States of America: Closed consultation on National Institute of Standards and Technology Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees

On 25 January 2024, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) closed the public consultation on the Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees. The guidelines were published in response to President Biden's Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence to provide clarification on ways to evaluate differential privacy, defined as privacy-enhancing technology quantifying privacy risk to individuals when their data is included in a dataset before it is deployed. The guidelines are addressed to stakeholders such as IT technicians, data scientists, and software engineers. The guideline outlines several privacy hazards and how they can be identified and includes the design of differential privacy guarantees that could be used to ensure real-world privacy protections and establish systems that ensure the applicability of privacy guarantees.