The U.S. Census Bureau has come up with a new way to protect privacy. Some researchers worry that it will hinder their ability to crunch numbers accurately.
FILE - In this April 26, 2019, file photo, visitors to New York's Times Square use umbrellas to shield themselves against the rain as they walk past the Armed Forces Recruitment Center. The U.S. Census Bureau is creating tighter privacy controls in response to new fears that census questions could threaten the privacy of the people who answered them.
“This is a brand new, radically more conservative definition of privacy,” University of Minnesota demographer Steven Ruggles said. The fear is that advertisers, market researchers or anybody with know-how and curiosity could use data to reconstruct the identities of census respondents. Historians have found evidence that census data helped identify Japanese Americans who were rounded up and confined to camps during World War II. That revelation led to an apology from then-Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt in 2000.
It’s analogous to pixilating the data, a technique commonly used to blur certain images on television, said Michael Hawes, senior adviser for data access and privacy at the Census Bureau.
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