The U.S. Census Bureau Adopts Differential Privacy

The U.S. Census Bureau announced, via its Scientific Advisory Committee, that it would protect the publications of the 2018 End-to-End Census Test (E2E) using differential privacy. The E2E test is a dress rehearsal for the 2020 Census, the constitutionally mandated enumeration of the population used to reapportion the House of Representatives and redraw every legislative district in the country. Systems that perform successfully in the E2E test are then used in the production of the 2020 Census. Motivation: The Census Bureau conducted internal research that confirmed that the statistical disclosure limitation systems used for the 2000 and 2010 Censuses had serious vulnerabilities that were exposed by the Dinur and Nissim (2003) database reconstruction theorem. We designed a differentially private publication system that directly addressed these vulnerabilities while preserving the fitness for use of the core statistical products.