Erica Groshen, the ILR School’s senior economics adviser and the former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, served as co-editor of a special issue of the Harvard Data Science Review, Differential Privacy for the 2020 U.S. Census: Can We Make Data Both Private and Useful?

Groshen and co-editors Rubin Gong and Salil Vadhan contribute an introductory essay explaining that while the census data is necessary for a wide-range of entities, privacy protection is required by law, but is also becoming more difficult to achieve.

As a result, the U.S. Census Bureau has developed a formal privacy protection system. In her contribution to the issue, Disclosure Avoidance and the 2020 Census: What Do Researcher Need to Know?, Groshen and coauthor Daniel Goroff highlight ‘both what is new as well as what seems new but is actually little changed.”

A full version of this story appears on the ILR website.

Julie Greco is a communications specialist in the ILR School.