Social scientists are worried that the Census Bureau is ruining its own data in order to protect against phantom threats to Americans' privacy.
he could identify individuals in a supposedly anonymized database of private Netflix ratings. While most movie ratings are innocuous, Narayanan pointed out that some could offer clues about sensitive topics like a user’s political and religious views or sexual orientation.
This is known as a database reconstruction attack, and it can be done on a much larger scale than this toy example. The more summary statistics published about a dataset, the more potential there is to reverse-engineer the individual data points.The Census Bureau has published billions of statistics derived from the 2010 census.
But privacy advocates worried that even with data swapping, someone might be able to reconstruct a significant amount of confidential data. To find out how realistic this threat was, the agency conducted a wargaming exercise. John Abowd, the Census Bureau’s chief scientist and a driving force behind its new privacy strategy, described the results as “conclusive, indisputable, and alarming.
Earlier I quoted the Census Bureau’s John Abowd arguing that an attacker could have a “high degree of confidence in their results with minimal additional verification or field work.” The “field work” he has in mind seems to be contacting millions of people to ask for their race and ethnicity. But that’s the same work you’d have to do if you were constructing the database from scratch.
Ruggles, the demographer, has been trying for years to convince privacy advocates that differential privacy isn’t a good fit for census data. In 2019, he traveled to the University of California at Berkeley to meet with several prominent experts on differential privacy.“They were very nice,” Ruggles said. “But they didn’t believe me. They said, ‘you know we just have to do this. It will be all right.
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