Privacy protocols degraded census data: report

New privacy protocols introduced in the late stages of census planning “substantially degraded” the quality and timeliness of the data collected, according to a new report on 2020 census data.

While the report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine praised the U.S. Census Bureau for being able to adapt and innovate during the COVID-19 pandemic, the report also raised several issues that affected the quality of the data collected.

The report pointed to the Census Bureau’s “new and untested approach” to keeping census data confidential, which was introduced in the “very late stages of census planning,” according to the release.

“While confidentiality protection is a critically important responsibility of a statistical agency,” the report concluded, “this decision was made without appropriate consideration regarding the utility of resulting census data products to fulfill the many important functions of census data.”

“The new methods for confidentiality protection were not ready for use in 2020 census production and substantially degraded the value of the 2020 census data products in terms of timeliness and quality,” the release continued.

The new report found that there was a gap in the quality of data collected between racial and ethnic groups, which the news release warned has “adverse implications for use of the census data to equitably allocate fixed resources, such as Congressional representation, funding, and services.”

Compared with the 2010 census, net overcounts increased for white and Asian people, but net undercounts increased for Hispanic people, Black people and American Indians, according to the news release.

The report also said that proxy reporting of census information led to “age heaping” — reporting of ages ending in 0 or 5 at high levels — which the report said was more pronounced in the 2020 census than in the 2010 census. This likely occurred when a neighbor or landlord made the judgments for nonresponding households.

The report recommended that the 2030 census “should focus on a small and manageable number of major innovation areas and pursue a rigorous program of testing and systems development.”

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