Pointwise Maximal Leakage on General Alphabets

Pointwise maximal leakage (PML) is an operationally meaningful privacy measure that quantifies the amount of information leaking about a secret X to a single outcome of a related random variable Y. In this paper, we extend the notion of PML to random variables on arbitrary probability spaces. We develop two new definitions: First, we extend PML to countably infinite random variables by considering adversaries who aim to guess the value of discrete (finite or countably infinite) functions of X. Then, we consider adversaries who construct estimates of X that maximize the expected value of their corresponding gain functions. We use this latter setup to introduce a highly versatile form of PML that captures many scenarios of practical interest whose definition requires no assumptions about the underlying probability spaces.