Flaxman Co-Authors Study of Disclosure Avoidance Methods for Protecting Transgender Youth
Posted: 4/9/2025 ()
The U.S. Census Bureau collects demographic data every ten years, including sex, age, race, and household relationships. Individuals who disclose changes in recorded sex across censuses could be identified in reconstruction-based linkage attacks. In a recent study published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, CSDE Affiliate Abraham Flaxman (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) and doctoral student Os Keyes (Human Centered Design & Engineering) explored the effectiveness of the Census Bureau’s TopDown approach to disclosure avoidance, finding that it led to a 30 percent decrease in these attacks when compared to previous approaches. Read the full study here.