Differential Privacy

The U.S. Census Bureau has developed a Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) to ensure the privacy of individuals responding to the 2020 Census.  The system is designed to maximize privacy while maintaining usability of the resulting data.  Please refer to the U.S. Census Bureau Disclosure Avoidance site for more information. 

Over the past year, the U.S. Census Bureau has been tuning and testing DAS.  During this period, they have distributed a series of demonstration data sets to the public for evaluation.  The following table shows the results of the most recent demonstration dataset distributed on June 8, 2021.  It compares the 2010 Census results to Differential Privacy results developed using DAS on the same 2010 Census data.  The data in this table was obtained from IPUMS NHGIS.