The Census Bureau has announced new methods for disclosure control in public use data products. The new approach, known as differential privacy, represents a radical departure from current practice. In its pure form, differential privacy techniques may make the release of useful microdata impossible and limit the utility of tabular small-area data. Adoption of differential privacy will have far-reaching consequences for research. It is likely that scientists, planners, and the public will lose the free access we have enjoyed for six decades to reliable public Census Bureau data describing US social and economic change.
There are three sources of information about undercounts in nineteenth-century U.S. censuses: demographic analyses of net undercounts by age, sex, and race at the national level; record-linkage studies of gross undercounts for local communities; and contemporary testimony of the types and bases of underenumeration. This article reviews the strengths and limitations of each of these sources, assesses the extent of their agreement, and discusses the bases of their disagreement.
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