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    "headline": "Privacy Audits Were Selecting Their Own False Alarms",
    "slug": "privacy-audits-were-selecting-their-own-false-alarms",
    "dek": "Correcting membership-inference selection bias restored violations to the claimed confidence rate.",
    "summary": "Correcting membership-inference selection bias restored violations to the claimed confidence rate.",
    "body_text": "The authors identify a selection bias in statistical audits of differential privacy that can overstate leakage lower bounds. Reanalysis found uncorrected audits crossing theoretical bounds up to four times more often than their confidence level implied. Standard corrections returned violations to no more than the nominal rate.",
    "why_it_matters": "Correcting membership-inference selection bias restored violations to the claimed confidence rate.",
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    "modified_at": "2026-10-21T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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    "tags": [
      "differential privacy",
      "auditing",
      "statistics"
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    "image_url": null,
    "corrections": []
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-10-21-019",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2610.27021, original v1",
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    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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    "title": "Privacy Audits Were Selecting Their Own False Alarms",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-10-21T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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