Traditional differential privacy is independent of the data distribution.
However, this is not well-matched with the modern machine learning context,
where models are trained on specific data. As a result, achieving meaningful
privacy guarantees in ML often excessively reduces accuracy. We propose
Bayesian differential privacy (BDP), which takes into account the data
distribution to provide more practical privacy guarantees. We also derive a
general privacy accounting method under BDP, building upon the well-known
moments accountant. Our experiments demonstrate that in-distribution samples in
classic machine learning datasets, such as MNIST and CIFAR-10, enjoy
significantly stronger privacy guarantees than postulated by DP, while models
maintain high classification accuracy.