Washington State Data Office: Privacy Protected Census Data it Sampled is “Unfit” to Use

Washington State Data Office: Privacy Protected Census Data it Sampled is “Unfit” to Use

By Michelle DavisSep 14, 2020
"The majority of the data output from the DAS [disclosure avoidance system] appears to be unfit for most uses." Is how a letter to the Census Bureau's Disclosure Avoidance Team starts off. The letter, from the Washington State Office of Financial Management, which runs the state data center, sums up the results of the state's usability test of census data treated with a disclosure avoidance technique called "differential privacy," which introduces "statistical noise" into the dataset in order to maintain the privacy of individual data. Sampling the Technique: If you are unfamiliar with the technique you can read more about…
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What Does Differential Privacy in Census Data Mean for the Task of Redistricting?

What Does Differential Privacy in Census Data Mean for the Task of Redistricting?

By Michelle DavisSep 08, 2020
The law requires that any identifying information you give the Census Bureau be kept confidential for 75 yrs, but simply removing your information from what is published is no longer enough. Big data and powerful computing technology now allow almost anyone to "reconstruct" the seemingly anonymized information. That means it is increasingly possible to identify who you are, where you live, and other information from the census results. Here's how the Census Bureau plans to combat that. New for the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau will be using a process called differential privacy to inject "statistical noise" into the…
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Understanding the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance Policy. A.K.A. “Differential Privacy”

Understanding the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance Policy. A.K.A. “Differential Privacy”

By Michelle DavisSep 01, 2020
The Census Bureau is mandated by the U.S. constitution to complete a count of the population every decade. Few realize however, that Title 13, Sec. 9 of the U.S. Code also requires the Bureau to "keep personally identifiable information confidential for 72 years." With the growth of Big Data, this privacy mandate has become a much more complicated task, thanks to "database reconstruction," a method of partially reconstructing a private dataset from public aggregate information. Consider the well-known example below of how one data scientist obtained former Governor William Weld's medical history from aggregate data released to the Massachusetts Group…
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