Privacy Protection and Data Quality Are Everybody's Business

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The Census Bureau and many large Internet companies like Google and Apple have

adopted formal models for privacy protection in their publications and research. While

the technical details of these models are fascinating, their implications for how we live

and work in a world where vast amounts of data are processed daily to learn about us

are far more important. Privacy protection and statistical accuracy are competing uses of

the same good: the information in confidential databases. Engineers design the

algorithms for implementing the analysis with privacy protection. But society needs to

decide which statistics need to be more accurate than other statistics. That's not an

engineering decision, that's a public policy decision. I will talk about how to think about

that public policy.