Synthetic Data and Anonymization — Safe-to-Share Data
Sometimes the goal isn't to compute privately on real data but to produce data that's safe to share, publish, or hand to a less-trusted team — data that looks and behaves like the real thing without being about any real person. Synthetic data and anonymization promise exactly this, and they're widely used — but they also hide the subtlest privacy traps in the whole field. This post covers how to make shareable data, and the honest truth about how well it actually protects privacy.
Sometimes the goal is data safe to share. Anonymization (generalization, suppression, k-anonymity) is fragile against re-identification; synthetic data looks safe but the generator can memorize real people. The fix is the recurring move — differentially private synthetic data — and the lesson that nothing is automatically private.