  Government agencies typically need to take potential risks of disclosure into
account whenever they publish statistics based on their data or give external
researchers access to collected data. In this context, the promise of formal
privacy guarantees offered by concepts such as differential privacy seems to be
the panacea enabling the agencies to quantify and control the privacy loss
incurred by any data release exactly. Nevertheless, despite the excitement in
academia and industry, most agencies -- with the prominent exception of the
U.S. Census Bureau -- have been reluctant to even consider the concept for
their data release strategy. This paper discusses potential reasons for this.
We argue that the requirements for implementing differential privacy approaches
at government agencies are often fundamentally different from the requirements
in industry. This raises many challenges and questions that still need to be
addressed before the concept can be used as an overarching principle when
sharing data with the public. The paper does not offer any solutions to these
challenges. Instead, we hope to stimulate some collaborative research efforts,
as we believe that many of the problems can only be addressed by
interdisciplinary collaborations.
