FinP: Fairness-in-Privacy in Federated Learning by Addressing Disparities in Privacy Risk
Authors: Tianyu Zhao (University of California, Irvine), Mahmoud Srewa (University of California, Irvine), Salma Elmalaki (University of California, Irvine)
Volume: 2026
Issue: 4
Pages: 587–607
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2026-0136
Artifact: Available, Functional, Reproduced
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) inherently mitigates mass data centralization risks; however, its privacy protections are not equally distributed — leaving vulnerable individuals disproportionately exposed to sophisticated privacy attacks. Crucially, statistical heterogeneity in human-centric FL environments often results in an inequitable distribution of privacy risks, particularly affecting those whose sensitive attributes or behaviors make them outliers. To address this critical gap, we introduce FinP, a novel framework designed to formalize and enforce fairness-in-privacy by mitigating disproportionate client vulnerability to Source Inference Attacks (SIA). FinP operationalizes a two-pronged defense strategy that tackles both the symptoms and root causes of privacy disparity, ensuring that no group of clients bears an excessive privacy burden. It combines a server-side adaptive aggregation mechanism, which dynamically weights client contributions based on their estimated privacy risk, with a client-side regularization technique to curb localized overfitting that drives unique data memorization. Extensive empirical evaluations on FEMNIST, Human Activity Recognition (HAR), and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that FinP effectively aligns privacy fairness with primary task utility. Notably, FinP successfully mitigates SIA risks and reduces disparities in privacy exposure, establishing that strong fairness-in-privacy guarantees need not compromise model utility. Ultimately, FinP establishes equitable privacy protections by reducing vulnerability disparities by up to 57.14%, while preserving global model utility within a marginal ±1.75% of standard federated baselines.
Keywords: Human-centered system, Fairness, Privacy, Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, HAR
Copyright in PoPETs articles are held by their authors. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
