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Written By: Donna Daily, Chief, American Community Survey Office
We?ve heard from a number of data users lately who have questions about the status of our plans to strengthen confidentiality safeguards for our data products, including the American Community Survey (ACS), the?nation?s premier source for detailed population and housing information. We wanted to provide an update as we continue to evolve these safeguards in the face of challenges posed by the digital world we live in.
Our current assessment is that the science does not yet exist to comprehensively implement a formally private solution for the ACS. We expect a multiyear development period, including data user review and feedback, that will extend beyond 2025.?
As you might recall,?in 2018, we shared that the U.S. Census Bureau was modernizing disclosure avoidance safeguards for 2020 Census data products by moving to an approach known as differential privacy, a new, advanced, and far more powerful confidentiality protection system uniquely suited for a large-scale data product like a national census. Differential privacy is considered a formally private methodology because it provides an objective framework for quantifying global disclosure risk. We indicated at the time that we would eventually adapt this approach to the ACS and other products.
In 2019, we shared that adaptation to the ACS wouldn?t occur prior to 2025, given the complexity of implementing formal privacy for a complex multistage probability survey like the ACS. We also shared that our priority focus was to first develop the disclosure avoidance system for the 2020 Census data products. Continue reading...
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