The U.S. Census Bureau’s chief is defending a new tool meant to protect the privacy of people participating in the statistical agency’s questionnaires against calls to abandon it by prominent researchers who claim it jeopardizes the usefulness of numbers that are the foundation of the nation’s data infrastructure. The tool known as differential privacy “was selected as the best solution …
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Wednesday defended a controversial privacy technique being used by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 2020 census, a method the agency promised would only make small changes to actual numbers in counts of racial and ethnic groups. “So in order for us to keep up with that and protect people’s privacy, we have to implement …
