The guarantees of security and privacy defenses are often strengthened by relaxing the assumptions made about attackers or the context in which defenses are deployed. Such relaxations can be a highly worthwhile topic of exploration---even though they typically entail assuming a weaker, less powerful adversary---because there may indeed be great variability in both attackers' powers and their context. However, no weakening or contextual discounting of attackers' power is assumed for what some

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... e called "relaxed definitions" in the analysis of differential-privacy guarantees. Instead, the definitions so named are the basis of refinements and more advanced analyses of the worst-case implications of attackers---without any change assumed in attackers' powers. Because they more precisely bound the worst-case privacy loss, these improved analyses can greatly strengthen the differential-privacy upper-bound guarantees---sometimes lowering the differential-privacy epsilon by orders-of-magnitude. As such, to the casual eye, these analyses may appear to imply a reduced privacy loss. This is a false perception: the privacy loss of any concrete mechanism cannot change with the choice of a worst-case-loss upper-bound analysis technique. Practitioners must be careful not to equate real-world privacy with differential-privacy epsilon values, at least not without full consideration of the context.