WASHINGTON – Sixteen children lived alone in a wooded stretch of New York’s Jefferson County last year, at least according to the 2020 census results released earlier this month.
That’s because the Census Bureau applied a new algorithm to census results meant to protect respondents’ privacy – but it also created thousands of improbabilities like that block of “Boxcar Children” in upstate New York.
Privacy experts and the agency have argued that in the field of big data, the Census Bureau should do more to protect the privacy of respondents, hence the new algorithm, a method called differential privacy that adds statistical “noise” to data.
But some demographers fear the protections went too far. At stake is more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending over the next decade, allocated using population-based formulas. The debate over the utility of differentially private data has been theoretical – until now, as months of upcoming redistricting efforts and court fights put it to the test.
Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said the extra noise adds another level of complexity to redistricting and related litigation.