Event-set differential privacy for fine-grained data privacy protection

•We propose a fine-grained privacy model called α-event-set differential privacy which can achieve the desired granularity of privacy protection while allowing good data utility.•We present the definition, properties, and baseline mechanisms of α-event-set differential privacy.•We implement and evaluate α-event-set differential privacy on different statistical and analyzing applications, including mean estimation, histogram estimation, and machine learning.