Hosted by the DSI Cybersecurity Center

Speaker

Eran Toch, Associate Professor, Industrial Engineering, Tel Aviv University

Event Details

Thursday, September 18, 2025 (2:00 PM – 3:00 PM ET)

Location: Northwest Corner Building – Armen Avanessians Conference Room – 14th Floor (DSI Suite) – 550 W 120th St, New York, NY 10027

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: The Columbia Morningside campus is open to the Columbia community. If you do not have an active CUID, the deadline to register is at 12:00 PM the day before the event.

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Talk Information

When Differential Privacy Meets Human Decision-Making

Abstract: This talk presents a series of studies examining how users’ decisions interact with differentially private mechanisms, and how these choices affect the performance of models trained on the data. In an online experiment (n = 734), we show that privacy guarantees significantly shape people’s perceptions of data collection and their willingness to share. We introduce a conjoint-analysis tool that allows data scientists to evaluate and predict these behavioral effects on datasets. A follow-up study (n = 817) reveals that users’ sharing decisions significantly shape the data collected and the performance of a specific machine-learning model. Extending beyond user studies, we also analyze the privacy guarantees (especially epsilon values) used in real-world deployments of differential privacy across academic, commercial, and government settings. Together, these findings reframe the privacy–utility tradeoff: when user behavior and practical implementations are considered, stronger privacy guarantees can paradoxically improve model outcomes.

Bio: Eran Toch is an associate professor and head of the School of Industrial and Intelligent Systems Engineering at Tel Aviv University. His lab explores how human-computer interaction and machine learning can support people in managing privacy, security, and digital well-being. His research has been supported by the NSF-BSF SaTC program, the Israeli Science Foundation, the EU Horizon 2020 program, DARPA, and the Israel Ministry of Science. He has held visiting positions at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University, and currently chairs the 2026 Security and Privacy subcommittee at the ACM CHI Conference.