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 nation’s data infrastructure.
Several prominent state demographers and academic researchers had asked the statistical agency in August to abandon using differential privacy on future annual population estimates, which are used in the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funding each year, and future releases of American Community Survey data, which provide the most comprehensive information on how people live in the U.S.
By continuing to use the differential privacy algorithms, “the Census Bureau risks failing its responsibilities as a federal statistical agency to provide relevant, accurate, timely, and credible information for the public good," the researchers and demographers said. “In fact, the experience of the last few years has undermined user trust in the Census Bureau."
Some bias using the privacy tool “was inevitable from a purely mathematical perspective," but bureau statisticians have worked to minimize it, and delays were caused by the pandemic, which pushed back a series of releases of the 2020 census data, Santos said.
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