Differential Privacy Resources

Understand the implications of differential privacy for the 2020 Census. Access apps, articles, and comprehensive resources to learn how modernized data privacy can affect your work.

Enhancing privacy protections for the 2020 Census

The US Census Bureau has always carried out privacy protections in the form of top-coding, swapping, and suppressing data, but these protections have been minimal.
 

With the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau is modernizing and strengthening how it protects privacy in the statistics it releases. A newer protection framework applies algorithms to modify the statistics of the data. This added "noise" protects your data while still yielding accurate results when aggregated.

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Apps

Explore an introduction to differential privacy, a dashboard to help you compare data for your community, and a narrative map of census tract population counts.

What is Differential Privacy? How will it affect our work?

What is Differential Privacy? How will it affect our work?

Access a synthesis of differential privacy for the 2020 Census and learn about its implications.

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Compare Places dashboard

Compare Places dashboard

Compare the 2010 place level Summary File 1 (SF1) dataset against 2010 place level differentially private data.

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April Demonstration Census Data

April Demonstration Census Data

Explore 2020 census tract population counts in this narrative map.

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Understand how differential privacy affects census data

Using the latest demonstration data from the Census Bureau, you can create a web map comparing published 2010 Census data to 2010 Census data with differential privacy applied.

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A close up of US Census 2020 paperwork that displays the agency’s logo and address