Title: How Will Statistical Agencies Operate When All Data are Private?
Speaker: John Abowd, 2016 Recipient of Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics
Chair: Robert Parker, Chair, Shiskin Award Selection Committee
Time: Tuesday, September 6, 2016, 1 – 3 pm
Where: Auditorium, U.S. Census Bureau, 4600 Silver Hill Road, Suitland, Maryland
Contact: To be placed on the seminar attendance list at the Bureau of the Census, e-mail your name, affiliation, citizenship (if other than U.S. Citizen) and seminar name to Sandra.l.heineck@census.gov by noon of August 30 or call 301-763-7559 and leave a message. Bring a photo ID (passport and green card, if other than U.S. Citizen) to the seminar. The Census Bureau is located next to the Suitland Green Line Station in Suitland, MD.
Abstract: The dual problems of respecting citizen privacy and protecting the confidentiality of their data—Ken Prewitt’s famous “don’t ask/don’t tell” dictum—have become hopelessly conflated in the “Big Data” era. There are orders of magnitude more data outside an agency’s firewall than inside it—compromising the integrity of traditional statistical disclosure limitation methods. And increasingly the information processed by the agency was “asked” in a context wholly outside the agency’s operations—blurring the distinction between what was asked and what is published. Already private businesses like Microsoft, Google and Apple recognize that cybersecurity (safeguarding the integrity and access controls for internal data) and privacy protection (ensuring that what is published does not reveal too much about any person or business) are two sides of the same coin. This is a paradigm-shifting moment for statistical agencies. This talk will examine how statistical agencies can respond in manner consistent with their missions.