Latest Updates in 2020 Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) Development

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Latest Updates in 2020 Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS) Development

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To attempt to meet the December 31, 2020, statutory deadline for delivery of apportionment counts, the U.S. Census Bureau has been examining every operation to identify where to add resources and how to safely and appropriately streamline processes.

We understand that you have questions about how this impacts the development of the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS). We want to assure you that the Census Bureau remains committed to conducting a complete and accurate 2020 Census and protecting the health and safety of the public and our workforce.

DAS Development Scheduling

Given the compressed data processing schedule, our priorities are to complete the apportionment numbers by the end-of-year deadline and produce fit-for-use redistricting data by the March 31, 2021, statutory deadline. The DAS will not be used for the apportionment numbers, but to meet the deadlines we must focus DAS development on the redistricting data product before we can expand the scope to the larger Demographic and Housing Characteristics data product.

We are devoting our upcoming development sprints to fine-tuning the DAS to make it ready for production.  These continued improvements will help ensure accuracy for American Indian and Alaska Native areas and for “off-spine” geographies, such as incorporated places and Minor Civil Divisions. With these improvements in place, the Census Bureau’s Data Stewardship Executive Policy Committee (DSEP) will then be able to closely examine the privacy/accuracy tradeoff at various levels of privacy-loss budgets.

New Privacy-Protected Microdata File in September

In September, we will release another Privacy-Protected Microdata File (PPMF) and corresponding Detailed Summary Metrics. While our new operational plan means that this PPMF release will be limited to the Public Law 94-171 redistricting data, it will allow our data users to evaluate the significant improvements we have already made to the DAS over the last several development sprints. Stakeholder feedback on the PPMF and Detailed Summary Metrics will help inform our remaining development work, and will provide valuable input to DSEP when they make their decisions on setting the privacy-loss budget before the DAS goes into production.

Planning for the production and release of the remaining 2020 Census data products will restart immediately following completion of the apportionment and redistricting data planning activities.  

We appreciate your patience given the unprecedented nature of pandemic-triggered operational delays and their consequences.

We will continue to provide status updates as we move forward.

 


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About Disclosure Avoidance Modernization

The Census Bureau is protecting 2020 Census data products with a powerful new cryptography-based disclosure avoidance system known as “differential privacy.”  We are committed to producing 2020 Census data products that are of the same high quality you've come to expect while protecting respondent confidentiality from emerging privacy threats in today's digital world. 

 

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