Report On Statistical Disclosure And Disclosure Avoidance Techniques

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Privacy in Statistical Databases, PSD 2004, held in June 2004 in Barcelona, Spain as the final conference of the European IST Project Computational Aspects of Statistical Confidentiality. The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of tabular protection, methods for tabular protection, masking for microdata protection, risks in microdata protection, synthetic data, and software and case studies.

The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) is one of the U.S. Census Bureau's major surveys with features making it a uniquely valuable resource for researchers and policy analysts. However, the Census Bureau faces the challenge of protecting the confidentiality of survey respondents which has become increasingly difficult because numerous databases exist with personal identifying information that collectively contain data on household finances, home values, purchasing behavior, and other SIPP-relevant characteristics. A Roadmap for Disclosure Avoidance in the Survey of Income and Program Participation addresses these issues and how to make data from SIPP available to researchers and policymakers while protecting the confidentiality of survey respondents. The report considers factors such as evolving privacy risks, development of new methods for protecting privacy, the nature of the data collected through SIPP, the practice of linking SIPP data with administrative data, the types of data products produced, and the desire to provide timely access to SIPP data. The report seeks to balance minimizing the risk of disclosure against allowing researchers and policymakers to have timely access to data that support valid inferences.