Related papers: Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decen…
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…
The 2020 Decennial Census will be released with a new disclosure avoidance system in place, putting differential privacy in the spotlight for a wide range of data users. We consider several key applications of Census data in redistricting,…
As the U.S. Census Bureau implements its controversial new disclosure avoidance system, researchers and policymakers debate the necessity of new privacy protections for public statistics. With experiments on both public statistics and…
In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau transitioned from data swapping to differential privacy (DP) in its approach to de-identifying decennial census data. This decision has faced considerable criticism from data users, particularly due to…
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…
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…
Researchers from a growing range of fields and industries rely on public-access census data. These data are altered by census-taking agencies to minimize the risk of identification; one such disclosure avoidance measure is the data swapping…
The Census TopDown Algorithm (TDA) is a disclosure avoidance system using differential privacy for privacy-loss accounting. The algorithm ingests the final, edited version of the 2020 Census data and the final tabulation geographic…
Differential privacy (DP) is increasingly used to protect the release of hierarchical, tabular population data, such as census data. A common approach for implementing DP in this setting is to release noisy responses to a predefined set of…
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…
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…
To protect the confidentiality of the 2020 Census, the U.S. Census Bureau adopted a statistical disclosure limitation framework based on the principles of differential privacy. A key component was the TopDown Algorithm, which applied…
The US Census Bureau Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) balances confidentiality and utility requirements for the decennial US Census (Abowd et al., 2022). The DAS was used in the 2020 Census to produce demographic datasets critically used…
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 US Decennial Census provides valuable data for both research and policy purposes. Census data are subject to a variety of disclosure avoidance techniques prior to release in order to preserve respondent confidentiality. While many are…
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…
In 2018, the US Census Bureau designed a new data reconstruction and re-identification attack and tested it against their 2010 data release. The specific attack executed by the Bureau allows an attacker to infer the race and ethnicity of…
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…
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…
Differential privacy (DP) considers a scenario, where an adversary has almost complete information about the entries of a database This worst-case assumption is likely to overestimate the privacy thread for an individual in real life.…