ArticlePopulation research and policy review2022
The Role of Chance in the Census Bureau Database Reconstruction Experiment.
Article in Population research and policy review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Making the case for an International Childhood Cancer Data Partnership.Journal of the National Cancer Institute · 2025Article
- The shortcomings of synthetic census microdata.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Evaluating bias and noise induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's privacy protection methods.Science advances · 2024Article
- The counterfactual framework in Jarmin et al. is not a measure of disclosure risk of respondents.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- When Privacy Protection Goes Wrong: How and Why the 2020 Census Confidentiality Program Failed.The journal of economic perspectives : a journal of the American Economic Association · 2024Article
- "It's None of Their Damn Business": Privacy and Disclosure Control in the U.S. Census, 1790-2020.Population and development review · 2023Article
- Confidence-ranked reconstruction of census microdata from published statistics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Balancing data privacy and usability in the federal statistical system.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Reconstruction of age distributions from differentially private census data.Population research and policy review · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The Census Bureau plans a new approach to disclosure control for the 2020 census that will add noise to every statistic the agency produces for places below the state level. The Bureau argues the new approach is needed because the confidentiality of census responses is threatened by "database reconstruction," a technique for inferring individual-level responses from tabular data. The Census Bureau constructed hypothetical individual-level census responses from public 2010 tabular data and matched them to internal census records and to outside sources. The Census Bureau did not compare these results to a null model to demonstrate that their success in matching would not be expected by chance. This is analogous to conducting a clinical trial without a control group. We implement a simple simulation to assess how many matches would be expected by chance. We demonstrate that most matches reported by the Census Bureau experiment would be expected randomly. To extend the metaphor of the clinical trial, the treatment and the placebo produced similar outcomes. The database reconstruction experiment therefore fails to demonstrate a credible threat to confidentiality.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.