Related papers: Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decen…

In the face of increasingly severe privacy threats in the era of data and AI, the US Census Bureau has recently adopted differential privacy, the de facto standard of privacy protection for the 2020 Census release. Enforcing differential…

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…

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…

Differential privacy is becoming one gold standard for protecting the privacy of publicly shared data. It has been widely used in social science, data science, public health, information technology, and the U.S. decennial census.…

The quest for a precise and contextually grounded answer to the question in the present paper's title resulted in this stirred-not-shaken triptych, a phrase that reflects our desire to deepen the theoretical basis, broaden the practical…

The threat of reconstruction attacks has led the U.S. Census Bureau (USCB) to replace in the Decennial Census 2020 the traditional statistical disclosure limitation based on rank swapping with one based on differential privacy (DP), leading…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

We study a protocol for distributed computation called shuffled check-in, which achieves strong privacy guarantees without requiring any further trust assumptions beyond a trusted shuffler. Unlike most existing work, shuffled check-in…

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…

Differentially private (DP) mechanisms have been deployed in a variety of high-impact social settings (perhaps most notably by the U.S. Census). Since all DP mechanisms involve adding noise to results of statistical queries, they are…

Sampling is renowned for its privacy amplification in differential privacy (DP), and is often assumed to improve the utility of a DP mechanism by allowing a noise reduction. In this paper, we further show that this last assumption is…

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…

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.…

With the recent bloom of data, there is a huge surge in threats against individuals' private information. Various techniques for optimizing privacy-preserving data analysis are at the focus of research in the recent years. In this paper, we…

Disclosure avoidance (DA) systems are used to safeguard the confidentiality of data while allowing it to be analyzed and disseminated for analytic purposes. These methods, e.g., cell suppression, swapping, and k-anonymity, are commonly…

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…