ASA Connect

Dear ASA Community, 

The Department of Commerce Secretary issued an order on disclosure avoidance on June 4 that handcuffs the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis in terms of the techniques they can use for protecting the privacy of respondents. The order only allows coarsening and suppression and prohibits the use of noise infusion. We share the concern we are hearing widely for the future of such protection methods as differential privacy, synthetic data, and data swapping, the potential impacts of the policy on the availability of small-area tables and public use microdata files, and, in general, that there appears to have been no process for obtaining public input. ASA staff is conferring with our members with expertise in privacy and the community, making inquiries, and considering our course of action. 

Here are a few select pieces so far on the order:

• A New Commerce Policy Could Mean Less Public Data, Not Better Public Data, dataindex.us
• A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the Census Bureau, Hansi Lo Wang, NPR

John Abowd also has a LinkedIn post explaining what noise infusion is and listing the products affected. 

Best,

Steve

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Steve Pierson
Director of Science Policy
American Statistical Association
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