Census Bureau chief defends new privacy tool against critics
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
Associated Press
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. The researchers claim the tool jeopardizes the usability of numbers that are the foundation of the nation’s data infrastructure. U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos said in a letter last week that the method known as differential privacy “was selected as the best solution available” against efforts by outside groups to piece together the identities of participants in the bureau’s censuses and surveys by using third-party data and powerful computers.
