According to the official site for Data Privacy Day in the US, it is intended to promote “awareness about the many ways personal information is collected, stored, used, and shared, and education about privacy practices that will enable individuals to protect their personal information.” In the spirit of this, here are a few useful links to help people learn more about protecting privacy in official statistics.
Privacy protection as it relates to official statistics is known as “Statistical Disclosure Control”, or simply “Confidentiality”. It’s all about protecting confidential information about specific individuals while still making sure that we can maximize the usefulness and accessibility of government data.
- This post deposes the fairly widespread view that anonymizing data by removing names, addresses and such makes it safe to publish with no threat to people’s privacy.
- Our page and link to white paper co-authored with our partner Symbolix about safe dissemination through the use of statistical disclosure control
- Confidentiality Information Sheets from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
- A comprehensive set of Government-Created Resources related to privacy put together by the organizers of Data Privacy Day.
- The US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) –a fairly chunky PDF but worth a look if you are in the business of making government data available.
Happy Data Privacy Day!