Privacy Protection and Accuracy: What Do We Know? Do We Know Things?? Let's Find Out!

Evan Totty and Thor Watson

No 32989, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Statistical agencies have a dual mandate to provide accurate data and protect the privacy and confidentiality of data subjects. These mandates are fundamentally at odds and therefore must be balanced: more accurate data reduces privacy, while privacy protections introduce error that reduces accuracy. Balancing accuracy and privacy requires, among other things, that we can quantify accuracy and privacy. Quantifying privacy has become easier thanks to differential privacy. Quantifying accuracy may sound easy by comparison, but there are many challenges to doing this effectively. In this paper, we first discuss some challenges associated with quantifying data accuracy. We then focus on an often-ignored challenge, which is the existence of survey error in the data being protected. We provide an overview of how privacy protection error relates to total survey error. We also summarize recent work that uses validation data to quantify the impact of privacy protection error relative to and conditional on other sources of survey error. Finally, we discuss opportunities and challenges for future work on data privacy and survey error.

JEL-codes: C42 C81 C83 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
Note: LS TWP
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Forthcoming: Privacy Protection and Accuracy: What Do We Know? Do We Know Things?? Let's Find Out! , Evan S. Totty, Thor Watson. in Data Privacy Protection and the Conduct of Applied Research: Methods, Approaches and their Consequences , Gong, Hotz, and Schmutte. 2024

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32989.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Chapter: Privacy Protection and Accuracy: What Do We Know? Do We Know Things?? Let's Find Out! (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32989

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32989
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().