Embodiments described herein provide a privacy mechanism to protect user data when transmitting the data to a server that estimates a frequency of such data amongst a set of client devices. In one embodiment, a differential privacy mechanism is implemented using a count-mean-sketch technique that can reduce resource requirements required to enable privacy while providing provable guarantees regarding privacy and utility. For instance, the mechanism can provide the ability to tailor utility (e.g. accuracy of estimations) against the resource requirements (e.g. transmission bandwidth and computation complexity).