The Commerce Department issued an order on June 4 prohibiting the use of "noise infusion" as a disclosure avoidance technique for Census Bureau statistical products. The potential implications for the ACS are still unclear, but this is worth watching closely.
The order: https://www.commerce.gov/opog/disclosure-avoidance-statistical-products
Depending on how the Census Bureau interprets the order, several ACS disclosure avoidance methods-including swapping, age perturbation, synthetic data, and limited uses of differential privacy-could potentially be affected, which could leave coarsening (aggregation, rounding, ranges) and suppression as the primary disclosure avoidance tools available to the Bureau.
We're hoping to learn more soon about how the Census Bureau plans to respond. Any insights or information would be greatly appreciated.
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Mark Mather
Associate VP
PRB
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