Related papers: Making Differential Privacy Work for Census Data U…
McCartan et al. (2023) call for "making differential privacy work for census data users." This commentary explains why the 2020 Census Noisy Measurement Files (NMFs) are not the best focus for that plea. The August 2021 letter from 62…
Agencies, such as the U.S. Census Bureau, release data sets and statistics about groups of individuals that are used as input to a number of critical decision processes. To conform to privacy and confidentiality requirements, these agencies…
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…
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…
The United States Census Bureau faces a difficult trade-off between the accuracy of Census statistics and the protection of individual information. We conduct the first independent evaluation of bias and noise induced by the Bureau's two…
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 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…
This paper is motivated by applications of a Census Bureau interested in releasing aggregate socio-economic data about a large population without revealing sensitive information about any individual. The released information can be the…
Formal disclosure avoidance techniques are necessary to ensure that published data can not be used to identify information about individuals. The addition of statistical noise to unpublished data can be implemented to achieve differential…
Data collected about individuals is regularly used to make decisions that impact those same individuals. We consider settings where sensitive personal data is used to decide who will receive resources or benefits. While it is well known…
Statistical agencies rely on sampling techniques to collect socio-demographic data crucial for policy-making and resource allocation. This paper shows that surveys of important societal relevance introduce sampling errors that unevenly…
The U.S. Census Bureau is using differential privacy (DP) to protect confidential respondent data collected for the 2020 Decennial Census of Population & Housing. The Census Bureau's DP system is implemented in the Disclosure Avoidance…
When differential privacy was created more than a decade ago, the motivating example was statistics published by an official statistics agency. In attempting to transition differential privacy from the academy to practice, the U.S. Census…
Firms and statistical agencies must protect the privacy of the individuals whose data they collect, analyze, and publish. Increasingly, these organizations do so by using publication mechanisms that satisfy differential privacy. We consider…
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…
We develop formal privacy mechanisms for releasing statistics from data with many outlying values, such as income data. These mechanisms ensure that a per-record differential privacy guarantee degrades slowly in the protected records'…
To protect user privacy in data analysis, a state-of-the-art strategy is differential privacy in which scientific noise is injected into the real analysis output. The noise masks individual's sensitive information contained in the dataset.…
In response to calls for open data and growing privacy threats, organizations are increasingly adopting privacy-preserving techniques such as differential privacy (DP) that inject statistical noise when generating published datasets. These…
Privacy preserving data publishing has attracted considerable research interest in recent years. Among the existing solutions, {\em $\epsilon$-differential privacy} provides one of the strongest privacy guarantees. Existing data publishing…
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.…