Abstract
Data from the American Community Survey (ACS) are collected under the authority of Title 13 of the United States Code which guarantees the confidentiality of all survey respondents. To maintain this confidentiality while still being able to release usable data, the U.S. Census Bureau applies several disclosure avoidance methods. For the ACS, data swapping techniques are used to protect records deemed “at risk”. Households are identified as at risk if they are unique on attributes selected and predetermined by the confidentiality and survey management staff. After being uniquely identified (or “flagged”), data swapping is used to exchange the geographic information of a flagged household with another flagged household. This study compared the effectiveness of the pair-swapping method currently used with a proposed n-Cycle swapping method. Specifically, the goal was to maintain the same level of disclosure protection while outputting data with less perturbation.
This report is released to inform interested parties of research and to encourage discussion. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
U.S. Census Bureau. Design and Methodology: American Community Survey. United States Government Printing Office (2009)
Duncan, G.T., Keller-McNulty, S.A., Stokes, S.L.: Disclosure risk vs. data utility: The ru confidentiality map. In: Chance, Citeseer (2001)
Elliott, M.: Disclosure risk assessment. In: Theeuwes, J., Doyle, P., Lane, J., Zayatz, L. (eds.) Confidentiality, Disclosure, and Data Access: Theory and Practical Applications for Statistical Agencies, pp. 75–89. Elsevier (2001)
Gallian, J.A.: Contemporary Abstract Algebra. Brooks/Cole (2009)
Geographic Standards and Criteria Branch. Guidelines for the delineation of 5 percent and 1-percent public use microdata areas (2000)
Kampstra, P.: Beanplot: A boxplot alternative for visual comparison of distributions. Journal of Statistical Software, Code Snippets 28(1), 1–9 (2008)
Muralidhar, K., Sarathy, K.: Data shuffling- a new masking approach for numeric data. Management Science 52, 658–670 (2006)
Muralidhar, K., Sarathy, R., Dandekar, R.A.: Why Swap When You Can Shuffle? A Comparison of the Proximity Swap and Data Shuffle for Numeric Data. In: Domingo-Ferrer, J., Franconi, L. (eds.) PSD 2006. LNCS, vol. 4302, pp. 164–176. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Sweeney, L.: k-anonymity: a model for protecting privacy. International Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems 10(5), 557–570 (2002)
U.S. Census Bureau. Census 2000, Public Use Microdata Sample. Technical documentation, U.S. Census Bureau (2003), http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/doc/pums.pdf
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
DePersio, M., Lemons, M., Ramanayake, K.A., Tsay, J., Zayatz, L. (2012). n-Cycle Swapping for the American Community Survey. In: Domingo-Ferrer, J., Tinnirello, I. (eds) Privacy in Statistical Databases. PSD 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7556. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33627-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33627-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33626-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33627-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)