Census Bureau tables controversial privacy tool for survey
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
Associated Press
The U.S. Census Bureau is putting on hold plans to apply by 2025 a controversial method for protecting the privacy of participants in its most comprehensive survey of Americans after facing pushback from prominent researchers and demographers. The statistical agency said Wednesday in a blog post that the science doesn’t yet exist to apply differential privacy algorithms to the annual American Community Survey, which covers more than 40 topics ranging from income, Internet access, rent, disabilities and language spoken at home. Prominent demographers and other researchers had asked that plans to use it on the survey be dropped, claiming it would jeopardize the usability of the data.