Banning noise will be a disaster for statistical data products
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The U.S. Department of Commerce has ordered the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis to ban 'noise infusion' from all statistical data products. This targets differential privacy, the current gold standard for balancing data utility and privacy protection. The author argues this decision will be catastrophic: all competing disclosure avoidance techniques also rely on some form of randomness, and the mandated alternatives (coarsening and suppression) are blunt instruments that either destroy data utility — especially for minority populations — or leave statistical releases highly vulnerable to re-identification attacks. The author speculates the motivation may be to enable gerrymandering, suppress demographic research, or simply to avoid confronting the fundamental privacy/utility trade-off that differential privacy makes explicit.
