The U.S. Census Bureau’s chief is defending a new tool meant to protect the privacy of people participating in the agency’s questionnaires against calls to abandon it by prominent researchers and demographers.
FILE - Then-Census Bureau Director nominee Robert Santos, testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, July 15, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Santos is defending a new tool meant to protect the privacy of people who participate in the statistical agency's questionnaires against a call to abandon it by prominent researchers and demographers who claim it jeopardizes the usability of numbers that are the foundation of the nations data infrastructure.
The tool known as differential privacy “was selected as the best solution available" against efforts by outside groups or individuals to piece together the identities of participants in the bureau's censuses and surveys by using third-party data and powerful computers, U.S. Census Bureausaid in a letter last week. Concerns about privacy have grown in recent years as cyberattacks and threats of personal data being used for the wrong reasons have become more commonplace.
data had delayed their release and created inaccuracies in the numbers used to determine political power and distribute federal funds. The researchers said in their letter that there were thousands of small jurisdictions throughout the U.S. that won’t get usable data because of the algorithms applied to the numbers to protect confidentiality.
Differential privacy algorithms add intentional errors to data to obscure the identity of any given participant and is most noticeable at the smallest geographies, such as census blocks. Data used for determining how many congressional seats each state gets and for redrawing political districts were released last year, butfrom the 2020 census won't be made public until next year, almost three years after they were collected.
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