Confidentiality protection for linked administrative data is a combination of access modalities and statistical disclosure limitation. We review traditional statistical disclosure limitation methods and newer methods based on synthetic data, input noise infusion and formal privacy. We discuss how these methods are integrated with access modalities by providing three detailed examples. The first example is the linkages in the Health and Retirement Study to Social Security Administration data. The second example is the linkage of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration. The third example is the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data, which links state unemployment insurance records for workers and firms to a wide variety of censuses and surveys at the U.S. Census Bureau. For examples, we discuss access modalities, disclosure limitation methods, the effectiveness of those methods, and the resulting analytical validity. The final sections discuss recent advances in access modalities for linked administrative data.
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Access Methods for United States Microdata
August 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-25
Beyond the traditional methods of tabulations and public-use microdata samples, statistical agencies have developed four key alternatives for providing non-government researchers with access to confidential microdata to improve statistical modeling. The first, licensing, allows qualified researchers access to confidential microdata at their own facilities, provided certain security requirements are met. The second, statistical data enclaves, offer qualified researchers restricted access to confidential economic and demographic data at specific agency-controlled locations. Third, statistical agencies can offer remote access, through a computer interface, to the confidential data under automated or manual controls. Fourth, synthetic data developed from the original data but retaining the correlations in the original data have the potential for allowing a wide range of analyses.
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Dynamically Consistent Noise Infusion and Partially Synthetic Data as Confidentiality Protection Measures for Related Time Series
July 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-13
The Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) provide detailed quarterly statistics on employment measures such as worker and job flows, tabulated by worker characteristics in various combinations. The data are released for several levels of NAICS industries and geography, the lowest aggregation of the latter being counties. Disclosure avoidance methods are required to protect the information about individuals and businesses that contribute to the underlying data. The QWI disclosure avoidance mechanism we describe here relies heavily on the use of noise infusion through a permanent multiplicative noise distortion factor, used for magnitudes, counts, differences and ratios. There is minimal suppression and no complementary suppressions. To our knowledge, the release in 2003 of the QWI was the first large-scale use of noise infusion in any official statistical product. We show that the released statistics are analytically valid along several critical dimensions { measures are unbiased and time series properties are preserved. We provide an analysis of the degree to which confidentiality is protected. Furthermore, we show how the judicious use of synthetic data, injected into the tabulation process, can completely eliminate suppressions, maintain analytical validity, and increase the protection of the underlying confidential data.
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An In-Depth Examination of Requirements for Disclosure Risk Assessment
October 2023
Authors:
Ron Jarmin,
John M. Abowd,
Ian M. Schmutte,
Jerome P. Reiter,
Nathan Goldschlag,
Michael B. Hawes,
Robert Ashmead,
Ryan Cumings-Menon,
Sallie Ann Keller,
Daniel Kifer,
Philip Leclerc,
Rolando A. Rodr�guez,
Victoria A. Velkoff,
Pavel Zhuravlev
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-49
The use of formal privacy to protect the confidentiality of responses in the 2020 Decennial Census of Population and Housing has triggered renewed interest and debate over how to measure the disclosure risks and societal benefits of the published data products. Following long-established precedent in economics and statistics, we argue that any proposal for quantifying disclosure risk should be based on pre-specified, objective criteria. Such criteria should be used to compare methodologies to identify those with the most desirable properties. We illustrate this approach, using simple desiderata, to evaluate the absolute disclosure risk framework, the counterfactual framework underlying differential privacy, and prior-to-posterior comparisons. We conclude that satisfying all the desiderata is impossible, but counterfactual comparisons satisfy the most while absolute disclosure risk satisfies the fewest. Furthermore, we explain that many of the criticisms levied against differential privacy would be levied against any technology that is not equivalent to direct, unrestricted access to confidential data. Thus, more research is needed, but in the near-term, the counterfactual approach appears best-suited for privacy-utility analysis.
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Why the Economics Profession Must Actively Participate in the Privacy Protection Debate
March 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-09
When Google or the U.S. Census Bureau publish detailed statistics on browsing habits or neighborhood characteristics, some privacy is lost for everybody while supplying public information. To date, economists have not focused on the privacy loss inherent in data publication. In their stead, these issues have been advanced almost exclusively by computer scientists who are primarily interested in technical problems associated with protecting privacy. Economists should join the discussion, first, to determine where to balance privacy protection against data quality; a social choice problem. Furthermore, economists must ensure new privacy models preserve the validity of public data for economic research.
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Resolving the Tension Between Access and Confidentiality: Past Experience and Future Plans at the U.S. Census Bureau
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-33
This paper provides an historical context for access to U.S. Federal statistical data with a primary focus on the U.S. Census Bureau. We review the various modes used by the Census Bureau to make data available to users, and highlight the costs and benefits associated with each. We highlight some of the specific improvements underway or under consideration at the Census Bureau to better serve its data users, as well as discuss the broad strategies employed by statistical agencies to respond to the challenges of data access.
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Confidentiality Protection in the Census Bureau Quarterly Workforce Indicators
February 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-02
The QuarterlyWorkforce Indicators are new estimates developed by the Census Bureau's Longitudinal
Employer-Household Dynamics Program as a part of its Local Employment Dynamics
partnership with 37 state Labor Market Information offices. These data provide detailed quarterly
statistics on employment, accessions, layoffs, hires, separations, full-quarter employment
(and related flows), job creations, job destructions, and earnings (for flow and stock categories of
workers). The data are released for NAICS industries (and 4-digit SICs) at the county, workforce
investment board, and metropolitan area levels of geography. The confidential microdata - unemployment
insurance wage records, ES-202 establishment employment, and Title 13 demographic
and economic information - are protected using a permanent multiplicative noise distortion factor.
This factor distorts all input sums, counts, differences and ratios. The released statistics are analytically
valid - measures are unbiased and time series properties are preserved. The confidentiality
protection is manifested in the release of some statistics that are flagged as "significantly distorted
to preserve confidentiality." These statistics differ from the undistorted statistics by a significant
proportion. Even for the significantly distorted statistics, the data remain analytically valid for
time series properties. The released data can be aggregated; however, published aggregates are
less distorted than custom postrelease aggregates. In addition to the multiplicative noise distortion,
confidentiality protection is provided by the estimation process for the QWIs, which multiply imputes
all missing data (including missing establishment, given UI account, in the UI wage record
data) and dynamically re-weights the establishment data to provide state-level comparability with
the BLS's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
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Synthetic Data and Confidentiality Protection
September 2003
Working Paper Number:
tp-2003-10
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Effects of a Government-Academic Partnership: Has the NSF-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve the U.S. Statistical System?
January 2017
Authors:
Lars Vilhuber,
John M. Abowd,
Daniel Weinberg,
Jerome P. Reiter,
Matthew D. Shapiro,
Robert F. Belli,
Noel Cressie,
David C. Folch,
Scott H. Holan,
Margaret C. Levenstein,
Kristen M. Olson,
Jolene Smyth,
Leen-Kiat Soh,
Bruce D. Spencer,
Seth E. Spielman,
Christopher K. Wikle
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-59R
The National Science Foundation-Census Bureau Research Network (NCRN) was established in 2011 to create interdisciplinary research nodes on methodological questions of interest and significance to the broader research community and to the Federal Statistical System (FSS), particularly the Census Bureau. The activities to date have covered both fundamental and applied statistical research and have focused at least in part on the training of current and future generations of researchers in skills of relevance to surveys and alternative measurement of economic units, households, and persons. This paper discusses some of the key research findings of the eight nodes, organized into six topics: (1) Improving census and survey data collection methods; (2) Using alternative sources of data; (3) Protecting privacy and confidentiality by improving disclosure avoidance; (4) Using spatial and spatio-temporal statistical modeling to improve estimates; (5) Assessing data cost and quality tradeoffs; and (6) Combining information from multiple sources. It also reports on collaborations across nodes and with federal agencies, new software developed, and educational activities and outcomes. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the ability of the FSS to apply the NCRN's research outcomes and suggests some next steps, as well as the implications of this research-network model for future federal government renewal initiatives.
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Design Comparison of LODES and ACS Commuting Data Products
October 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-38
The Census Bureau produces two complementary data products, the American Community Survey (ACS) commuting and workplace data and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), which can be used to answer questions about spatial, economic, and demographic questions relating to workplaces and home-to-work flows. The products are complementary in the sense that they measure similar activities but each has important unique characteristics that provide information that the other measure cannot. As a result of questions from data users, the Census Bureau has created this document to highlight the major design differences between these two data products. This report guides users on the relative advantages of each data product for various analyses and helps explain differences that may arise when using the products.2,3
As an overview, these two data products are sourced from different inputs, cover different populations and time periods, are subject to different sets of edits and imputations, are released under different confidentiality protection mechanisms, and are tabulated at different geographic and characteristic levels. As a general rule, the two data products should not be expected to match exactly for arbitrary queries and may differ substantially for some queries.
Within this document, we compare the two data products by the design elements that were deemed most likely to contribute to differences in tabulated data. These elements are: Collection, Coverage, Geographic and Longitudinal Scope, Job Definition and Reference Period, Job and Worker Characteristics, Location Definitions (Workplace and Residence), Completeness of Geographic Information and Edits/Imputations, Geographic Tabulation Levels, Control Totals, Confidentiality Protection and Suppression, and Related
Public-Use Data Products.
An in-depth data analysis'in aggregate or with the microdata'between the two data products will be the subject of a future technical report. The Census Bureau has begun a pilot project to integrate ACS microdata with LEHD administrative data to develop an enhanced frame of employment status, place of work, and commuting. The Census Bureau will publish quality metrics for person match rates, residence and workplace match rates, and commute distance comparisons.
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Using Partially Synthetic Microdata to Protect Sensitive Cells in Business Statistics
February 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-10
We describe and analyze a method that blends records from both observed and synthetic microdata into public-use tabulations on establishment statistics. The resulting tables use synthetic data only in potentially sensitive cells. We describe different algorithms, and present preliminary results when applied to the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics and Synthetic Longitudinal Business Database, highlighting accuracy and protection afforded by the method when compared to existing public-use tabulations (with suppressions).
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