[onetimeusename]

There has been debate among statisticians and political scientists about using differential privacy for census data. 2020 was actually the first Decennial Census that used differential privacy. This is the mandated census done every 10 years that counts population and is used for apportionment. Some have criticized the use of differential privacy.[1][2] But others have argued that coarsening does not protect privacy sufficiently and that differential privacy does not distort apportionment.

The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...

[2]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283

[_alternator_]

I'd like to emphasize that coarsening is not just theoretically non-private, a number of attacks that lead to leaking personally identifiable data were demonstrated on the 2010 census. So it's not really a he-said/she-said situation.

[onetimeusename]

That's not what I said or implied it is. I said there has been criticism of using differential privacy and linked to it. I also mentioned the reconstruction attacks on coarsening. Those two things can be true at the same time.

[censusnerd]

There are glaring factual problems with the florida lawsuit and recent critiques of the 2020 Census DP usage. (See 1.) Whether they're not aware or intentionally malicious, critics who claim the constitutional issue say that DP was applied to state-level counts. But disclosure avoidance (such as DP noise) was never applied to state-level population counts used for congressional apportionment---which is the constitutional purpose. There is no constitutional argument here. Drawing districts using block-level data is a totally different issue (a statutory not constitutional one), and disclosure avoidance was applied to those statistics.

1 https://apnews.com/article/2020-census-bureau-redistricting-...

[onetimeusename]

I wasn't referring to the Florida lawsuit and don't know anything about it. I was referring to the Alabama lawsuit which was dismissed without prejudice[1] because it was premature. The relevant constitutional issue is the redistricting balance since it has to follow the "one person, one vote" principle.

[1]: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi...