Proceedings from the 2017 Cornell-Census- NSF- Sloan Workshop on Practical Privacy

Vilhuber, Lars, and Ian M. Schmutte. Proceedings from the 2017 Cornell-Census- NSF- Sloan Workshop on Practical Privacy. Cornell University Preprint 1813:52473, 2017, available at http://hdl.handle.net/1813/52473.
Proceedings from the 2017 Cornell-Census- NSF- Sloan Workshop on Practical Privacy Vilhuber, Lars; Schmutte, Ian M. ese proceedings report on a workshop hosted at the U.S. Census Bureau on May 8, 2017. Our purpose was to gather experts from various backgrounds together to continue discussing the development of formal privacy systems for Census Bureau data products. is workshop was a successor to a previous workshop held in October 2016 (Vilhuber & Schmu e 2017). At our prior workshop, we hosted computer scientists, survey statisticians, and economists, all of whom were experts in data privacy. At that time we discussed the practical implementation of cu ing-edge methods for publishing data with formal, provable privacy guarantees, with a focus on applications to Census Bureau data products. e teams developing those applications were just starting out when our rst workshop took place, and we spent our time brainstorming solutions to the various problems researchers were encountering, or anticipated encountering. For these cu ing-edge formal privacy models, there had been very li le e ort in the academic literature to apply those methods in real-world se ings with large, messy data. We therefore brought together an expanded group of specialists from academia and government who could shed light on technical challenges, subject ma er challenges and address how data users might react to changes in data availability and publishing standards. In May 2017, we organized a follow-up workshop, which these proceedings report on. We reviewed progress made in four di erent areas. e four topics discussed as part of the workshop were 1. the 2020 Decennial Census; 2. the American Community Survey (ACS); 3. the 2017 Economic Census; 4. measuring the demand for privacy and for data quality. As in our earlier workshop, our goals were to 1. Discuss the speci c challenges that have arisen in ongoing e orts to apply formal privacy models to Census data products by drawing together expertise of academic and governmental researchers; 2. Produce short wri en memos that summarize concrete suggestions for practical applications to speci c Census Bureau priority areas. Comments can be provided at h ps://goo.gl/ZAh3YE