Differential Privacy Resources
What the heck is differential privacy?
What does this mean for GIS analysts working with decennial census data?
This site is a repository of resources to help.
What is differential privacy?
Privacy for census respondents is constitutionally mandated, and accuracy is enshrined in the Census Bureau's mission to be the leading provider of demographic data for the nation. These two aims are inherently conflicting.
Census has always done privacy protections in the form of top-coding, swapping, and suppressing data, but this has been minimal. Given the advances in computing and the amount of external data available, these techniques are insufficient to protect privacy.
Census is modernizing and strengthening how they protect privacy in the statistics released starting with the 2020 Census. This involves adding small amounts of "noise" to the data. See the U.S. Census Bureau's comprehensive site on 2020 Data Products and Disclosure Avoidance Modernization.
What are the implications? What does this mean for GIS work? What does this mean for my area? This site is a repository of resources to help answer these questions.
Apps:
An introductory story map, dashboards to help you compare data for your community, a story map of a spatial analysis of the April demonstration file, as well as the Final demonstration file.
How will this affect your work?
Use the latest demonstration product feature layer to create web maps to compare Census demonstration products with census 2010 values.
Run your most important GIS workflows through these four steps:
- Use the 2010 published data (included in the demonstration data).
- Run your workflow again using the 2010 differentially private data.
- Evaluate the differences in the two results. Remember that there has to be error somewhere to protect privacy.
- If there are significant issues, give feedback to the Census Bureau on your use-case.
Census Data Available:
The first Decennial Census Data with noise added to it was the redistricting data released from Census last fall. This data is available in ArcGIS Living Atlas for 11 levels of geography. A state-specific layer for blocks exists for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
The pop-ups for blocks, block groups, and tracts display aggregated values for the surrounding area rather than values for the polygon itself. Since this data has been protected with differential privacy, aggregating up helps to report more accurate statistics.
All Resources
- Introductory materials:
- What is Differential Privacy? How will it affect our work? (story map)
- Census 2020 Differential Privacy (blog article)
- U.S. Census Bureau's resources on 2020 Data Products and Disclosure Avoidance Modernization
- U.S. Census Bureau's Disclosure Avoidance Handbook
- What is Differential Privacy? How will it affect our work? (story map)
- Census 2020 Differential Privacy (blog article)
- U.S. Census Bureau's resources on 2020 Data Products and Disclosure Avoidance Modernization
- U.S. Census Bureau's Disclosure Avoidance Handbook
- What this means for GIS analysts:
- How will Census 2020 Differential Privacy Impact You? (blog article)
- Differential Privacy - What GIS Users Need to Know (webinar recording)
- Accuracy vs. Privacy: create web maps to compare Census demonstration products (blog article and feature layers)
- Compare Places Dashboard DAS 12.2 (blog article and dashboard)
- Compare Places Dashboard v2022-03-16 (blog article and dashboard)
- Spatial analysis of April Demonstration Data (story map) and Final Demonstration Data (story map)
- Census redistricting data and maps available in ArcGIS Living Atlas (blog article)
- The perfect layer effect for differentially-private data: Blur (blog article)
- Esri Realigns Census 2020 Data for Esri Updated Demographics (blog article)
- How Much Noise is in Census 2020 Data? Esri Can Show You! (blog article)
- How will Census 2020 Differential Privacy Impact You? (blog article)
- Differential Privacy - What GIS Users Need to Know (webinar recording)
- Accuracy vs. Privacy: create web maps to compare Census demonstration products (blog article and feature layers)
- Compare Places Dashboard DAS 12.2 (blog article and dashboard)
- Compare Places Dashboard v2022-03-16 (blog article and dashboard)
- Spatial analysis of April Demonstration Data (story map) and Final Demonstration Data (story map)
- Census redistricting data and maps available in ArcGIS Living Atlas (blog article)
- The perfect layer effect for differentially-private data: Blur (blog article)
- Esri Realigns Census 2020 Data for Esri Updated Demographics (blog article)
- How Much Noise is in Census 2020 Data? Esri Can Show You! (blog article)