A brief introduction to differential privacy for the 2020 census

Additional information about differential privacy:

• The Census Bureau has compiled information about differential privacy here, as well as a history of census data protections dating back to 1790.

• The National Conference of State Legislators has a differential privacy explainer that discusses the issue of how differential privacy might disproportionally affect data in rural areas.

• “Balancing Data Utility and Confidentiality in the 2020 U.S. Census” is a living document in which technology scholar Danah Boyd digs into the reasons for and potential risks of differential privacy. Boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of the Data and Society Research Institute.

• Here’s a link to an 18-minute video in which computer scientist Cynthia Dwork provides a definition of differential privacy. Dwork is a professor of computer science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and author of several pioneering papers on differential privacy, including “Differential Privacy and the US Census.”

• This piece is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For educators, editors and anyone else who would like to republish it in print, we are providing access to a high-resolution PDF of this comic here: Download a high-resolution PDF .