Critics of a method used by the U.S. Census Bureau in the name of protecting the confidentiality of individuals argue the approach could ultimately cause more harm than good.
“In the name of protecting privacy, the Census is skewing public data and sometimes under-reporting the number of people who live in racially-mixed areas,” AP western political writer Nick Riccardi posted on Twitter.
The so-called differential privacy method operates by intentionally adding errors to data in order to obscure the identity of any given individual.
While Bureau officials deem it necessary to protect the privacy of citizens, those opposed argue it could have the effect of causing legitimate neighborhoods and communities to either disappear or become so drastically altered they become easy to ignore. Amid all the back and forth, Bureau officials stand by their position that the method is needed in order to protect the privacy of individuals in an era of increasingly sophisticated data mining and the like.
Still, a group of Harvard University researchers recently warned that relying on such methods run the risk of making it more difficult to create political districts of equal population, and may even lead to fewer majority-minority districts. Upon deeper analysis, researchers concluded the practice was more likely to undercount mixed-race and mixed-partisan precincts, “yielding unpredictable racial and partisan biases.”
The report also highlighted “our findings underscore the difficulty of balancing accuracy and respondent privacy in the Census.”
Through it all, government officials have refused to budge from their position and thus far the courts have found no reason to force them to. In a recent case in Alabama where the method was challenged, Census Bureau chief scientist John Abowd argues during the proceedings the data in question is “extremely accurate,” adding the use of differential privacy showed no bias regarding racial or ethnic minorities.
“Redistricters can remain confident in the accuracy of the population counts and demographic characteristics of the voting districts they draw, despite the noise in the individual building blocks,” he added.
