Expert Source on Census Data Privacy Policy for The New York Times

The results of all this, experts tell WIRED, are that fewer people will feel safe participating in the census and that the government will likely need to spend even more resources to try to get an accurate count. Undercounting could lead to skewed numbers that could impact everything from congressional representation to the amount of funding a municipality might receive from the government. Neither the proposed COUNT Act nor Senator Banks’ letter outlines an alternative to differential privacy. This means that the Census Bureau would likely be left with two options: Publish data that could put people at risk (which could lead to legal consequences for its staff), or publish less data. “At present, I do not know of any alternative to differential privacy that can safeguard the personal data that the US Census Bureau uses in their work on the decennial census,” says Abraham Flaxman, an associate professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington, whose team conducted the study on transgender youth. Getting rid of differential privacy is not a “light thing,” says a Census employee familiar with the bureau’s privacy methods and who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “It may be for the layperson. But the entire apparatus of disclosure avoidance at the bureau has been geared for the last almost 10 years on differential privacy.” According to the employee, there is no immediately clear method to replace differential privacy. Boyd says that the safest bet would simply be “what is known as suppression, otherwise known as ‘do not publish.’” (This, according to Garfinkel, was the backup plan if differential privacy had not been implemented for the 2020 census.) Another would be for the Census Bureau to only publish population counts, meaning that demographic information like the race or age of respondents would be left out. “This is a problem, because we use census data to combat discrimination,” says Boyd. “The consequences of losing this data is not being able to pursue equity.”