An Examination of the Effect of Differential Privacy Techniques on the Data Utility of Estimates of the Cost of Childcare

Part of the JSM 2020 session "Private Data for the Public Good: Formal Privacy in Survey Organizations" sponsored by the Privacy and Confidentiality Committee on August 4, 2020.

Description: Differential Privacy will be applied to various 2020 Census Data Products to help protect the privacy of individuals. Where does formal privacy go from there? Survey organizations provide many types of data products, including survey sample data, administrative data, census data, business data, data from partial frames. Research continues, for example, as to applying formal privacy methods to survey data from complex samples, such as handling survey weights, accounting for the additional noise in variance estimation. The impact of the formal privacy movement on various data products such as both large-scale surveys and the numerous smaller-scale surveys remains unclear. Applying formal privacy methods to the survey organization environment brings forth challenges under tight budgets and limiting its impact on the utility of existing data products. This session will begin with discussion on Census Bureau’s formal privacy research agenda for complex survey statistics and then discuss the current state of formal privacy methods in relation to survey organizations.