Related papers: Randomness Concerns When Deploying Differential Pr…
In early 2021, the US Census Bureau will begin releasing statistical tables based on the decennial census conducted in 2020. Because of significant changes in the data landscape, the Census Bureau is changing its approach to disclosure…
Differential Privacy (DP) relies on random numbers to preserve privacy, typically utilising Pseudorandom Number Generators (PRNGs) as a source of randomness. In order to allow for consistent reproducibility, testing and bug-fixing in DP…
The concept of differential privacy (DP) has gained substantial attention in recent years, most notably since the U.S. Census Bureau announced the adoption of the concept for its 2020 Decennial Census. However, despite its attractive…
The U.S. Decennial Census serves as the foundation for many high-profile policy decision-making processes, including federal funding allocation and redistricting. In 2020, the Census Bureau adopted differential privacy to protect the…
This article describes a proposed differentially private (DP) algorithms that the US Census Bureau is considering to release the Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics (DHC) Race & Ethnicity tabulations as part of the 2020 Census.…
In an era where external data and computational capabilities far exceed statistical agencies' own resources and capabilities, they face the renewed challenge of protecting the confidentiality of underlying microdata when publishing…
The US Census Bureau plans to protect the privacy of 2020 Census respondents through its Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS), which attempts to achieve differential privacy guarantees by adding noise to the Census microdata. By applying…
This article describes the disclosure avoidance algorithm that the U.S. Census Bureau used to protect the Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A (Detailed DHC-A) of the 2020 Census. The tabulations contain statistics…
Protecting an individual's privacy when releasing their data is inherently an exercise in relativity, regardless of how privacy is qualified or quantified. This is because we can only limit the gain in information about an individual…
Differential privacy for the 2020 census required an estimated 90 terabytes of randomness [GL20], an amount which may be prohibitively expensive or entirely infeasible to generate. Motivated by these practical concerns, [CSV25] initiated…
This article describes the disclosure avoidance algorithm that the U.S. Census Bureau used to protect the 2020 Census Supplemental Demographic and Housing Characteristics File (S-DHC). The tabulations contain statistics of counts of U.S.…
Data from the Decennial Census is published only after applying a disclosure avoidance system (DAS). Data users were shaken by the adoption of differential privacy in the 2020 DAS, a radical departure from past methods. The goal of this…
In 2017, the United States Census Bureau announced that because of high disclosure risk in the methodology (data swapping) used to produce tabular data for the 2010 census, a different protection mechanism based on differential privacy…
Motivated by the 2020 US Census products, this paper extends differential privacy (DP) to address the joint release of DP outputs and nonprivate statistics, referred to as invariant. Our framework, Semi-DP, redefines adjacency by focusing…
The U.S. Census Bureau collects and publishes detailed demographic data about Americans which are heavily used by researchers and policymakers. The Bureau has recently adopted the framework of differential privacy in an effort to improve…
Emerging discussions on the responsible government use of algorithmic technologies propose transparency and public participation as key mechanisms for preserving accountability and trust. But in practice, the adoption and use of any…
This article describes SafeTab-H, a disclosure avoidance algorithm applied to the release of the U.S. Census Bureau's Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File B (Detailed DHC-B) as part of the 2020 Census. The tabulations…
When the U.S. Census Bureau announced its intention to modernize its disclosure avoidance procedures for the 2020 Census, it sparked a controversy that is still underway. The move to differential privacy introduced technical and procedural…
The US Census Bureau will implement a new privacy-preserving disclosure avoidance system (DAS), which includes application of differential privacy, on the public-release 2020 census data. There are concerns that the DAS may bias small-area…
Differential privacy (DP) enables private data analysis. In a typical DP deployment, controllers manage individuals' sensitive data and are responsible for answering analysts' queries while protecting individuals' privacy. They do so by…