The Census Bureau announce that several rounds of 2020 Census data on U.S. residents will be made public on 2023. The data, regarding age, sex, race and household relationships of U.S. residents, will be released on May 2023. The following month (June 2023), data on race and ethnic groups will be made public.
The data was originally slated to be released sooner, but was delayed due to the extra processing time required under a new technique designed to ensure privacy of US residents.
As reported by The Journal Record:
The privacy method is being used for the first time by the bureau in the 2020 census. Differential privacy adds intentional errors to data to obscure the identity of any given participant. It is most noticeable at the smallest geographies, such as census blocks.
Bureau officials say it’s necessary to protect privacy in a time of increasingly sophisticated data mining, as technological innovations magnify the threat of people being “re-identified” through the use of powerful computers to match census information with other public databases.
“These data are so important that we need to give the Census Bureau time to make them right,” Guthrie said. “They are building the plane while they are flying it. They haven’t done this before. Nobody has done this before.”
