Related papers: Denoising the US Census: Succinct Block Hierarchic…

The U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) bases its output on noisy measurements, which are population tabulations added to realizations of mean-zero random variables. These noisy measurements are observed for a set of…

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…

In "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm," Abowd et al. (2022) describe the concepts and methods used by the Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) to produce formally private output in support of the 2020 Census…

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…

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,…

The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) is a formally private mechanism that first adds independent noise to cross tabulations for a set of pre-specified hierarchical geographic units, which is known as the geographic spine. After…

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 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 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…

To meet its dual burdens of providing useful statistics and ensuring privacy of individual respondents, the US Census Bureau has for decades introduced some form of "noise" into published statistics. Initially, they used a method known as…

In "Differential Perspectives: Epistemic Disconnects Surrounding the US Census Bureau's Use of Differential Privacy," boyd and Sarathy argue that empirical evaluations of the Census Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS), including our published…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

Fine resolution estimates of demographic and socioeconomic attributes are crucial for planning and policy development. While several efforts have been made to produce fine-scale gridded population estimates, socioeconomic features are…

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…

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…