A new disclosure avoidance system (DAS) is needed to defend against new threats posed by today’s technology: growing computing power, advances in mathematics, and easy access to large, public databases. Combined, these changes could allow highly sophisticated users to identify common data points between our published statistics, or between our statistics and outside databases. They could use these common threads to potentially identify the people or businesses behind the statistics. Our research shows that the risk of successful re-identifications is unacceptably large. We are committed to applying better and stronger protections with each advance in data science.

Please see: Protecting the Confidentiality of America’s Statistics: Adopting Modern Disclosure Avoidance Methods at the Census Bureau and Ensuring Confidentiality and Fitness-for-Use.