APRIL 3, 2023 — The U.S. Census Bureau published a Federal Register Notice inviting the public to review and submit feedback on proposed modernized disclosure avoidance methods for 2022 County Business Patterns (CBP) data. The 60-day comment period will close June 2.

The Census Bureau is hosting a webinar for the public about its disclosure avoidance methods and how they apply to CBP data.

The proposed disclosure avoidance approach uses controlled, randomized “noise” (added prior to publishing statistics) to allow publication of data while withholding identifiable information to protect the privacy of establishments in the internal CBP database.

The approach includes two key components:

• Per-Record Differential Privacy, which gives a formal, mathematically provable privacy guarantee against exact inferences about establishments in the private database.
• Nondifferentially private, second-stage noise.

The Census Bureau has created demonstration tables based on synthetic data to give data users the opportunity to assess the impact of the proposed methodology. The demonstration tables can be found at <www.census.gov/topics/business-economy/disclosure/data/tables.html>.

Recordings, transcripts and slides for all disclosure avoidance webinars are on the series webinar page.       

Thursday, April 20, at 3 p.m. EDT

• WebEx link: Researching Formal Privacy for the Census Bureau’s CBP Program
• Webinar/Access number (if needed): 2761 531 3665
• Webinar password (if needed): Census#1