State Data Center (SDC) Clearinghouse

New decennial census demonstration data with differential privacy treatment

Posted on October 31, 2019 Updated on November 1, 2019

From US Census Bureau, Customer Liaison & Marketing Services Office:

In a new Research Matters blog, Balancing Privacy and Accuracy: New Opportunity for Disclosure Avoidance Analysis, we discuss the just-posted new 2010 Demonstration Data Products designed to help data users better understand the 2020 Census disclosure avoidance system (DAS) and its impact on data quality and privacy protection.

You can access the data via the new 2020 Census Data Products page on census.gov. You can also get there by searching “2020 data products” from the census.gov home page.

Please note that the data are only released via the FTP and in summary file format. Data will not be released on data.census.gov. As a data intermediary, you may be asked to provide or extract data in a different format. So we encourage you to take a look at the summary file format to become familiar with the data.

Data user feedback will help the Census Bureau’s senior leadership make informed decisions about the final structure of 2020 data products and the fine-tuning of the disclosure avoidance system. Because decennial census data are widely used in ways that go beyond the Census Bureau’s needs, we want to ensure that they are fit for as many data users’ needs as possible.  Feedback on the demonstration files should be sent to dcmd.2010.demonstration.data.products@census.gov

Please note that there will be a live Webcast of a National Academy of Sciences Center for National Statistics (CNSTAT) workshop on this topic on December 11-12, 2019. We’ll post more information on our Web site closer to the date.

Frequently Asked Questions for the Demonstration Data Products can be found on the census.gov website.