Data Confidentiality Workshop
Home Workshop Agenda Participants Travel Information

 

Contact

 

WORKSHOP ON DATA CONFIDENTIALITY

September 6-7, 2007 in Arlington, VA

White Paper & Bio
Statistical confidentiality is an essential principle of modern demographic and economic data-gathering and related statistical research. Today, the term "statistical confidentiality" encompasses in shorthand form a bundle of now widely-recognized activities. These may include
legal protections, standards of professional conduct, a set of non-disclosure assurances provided to respondents, and compilation and dissemination practices designed to protect data providers from improper use of their answers.
It wasn't always this way. As I and others have discussed, the practice of statistical confidentiality has a history. See for example the website of documents and papers that William Seltzer and I have prepared as a
resource: http://www.uwm.edu/~margo/govstat/integrity.htm.

Generations of statisticians and social scientists came to define the principles and practices we take as givens as they built the data production infrastructure primarily in the public sector of official statistics and social science that evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
notably long before the computer revolution and the internet.

A great deal of work has been done in recent years developing technical methods to protect confidentiality and to develop confidentiality standards for data collection, preservation and management. Much less
systematic work exists on the breaches, failures, and weaknesses of such protections, beyond the recounting of scandals and controversies when confidentiality is breached. I have called for more systematic work on
the history of the development of the practice and ethical issues involved with protecting data confidentiality. That history reveals how and why current practices came to be developed and also where systematic weaknesses exist. On the simplest level, such work involves examination
of the intentions and capacities of intruders, most notably those who have the legal, political, or economic power to breach confidentiality successfully.

In other words, in addition to intruders who one can characterize as data criminals (identity thieves, scandal mongering journalists), there have been in the past and will be in the future intruders who have legitimate competing claims to access information which nevertheless shatter the commitments of data confidentiality. Included here are national security
claims, subpoenas of data for civil and criminal prosecutions. This work involves historical and archival analysis of past controversies and breaches in other to understand the technical, legal, and political factors involved. See for example, Margo Anderson and William Seltzer (2007). "Challenges to the Confidentiality of U.S. Federal Statistics, 1910-1965." Journal of Official Statistics. 23(1): 1-34, available at
http://www.uwm.edu/~margo/govstat/integrity.htm.

Margo Anderson

University of Wisconsin

 

 

Biographical Data

Margo Anderson is Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. She received her PhD in History from Rutgers University in 1978. Her research and teaching interests have focussed on the history of the social sciences and the development of official data systems, particularly censuses and surveys. She has published several
books on the history of the American census, most notably The American Census: A Social History (Yale University Press, 1988); and with Stephen E. Fienberg, Who Counts? The Politics of Census Taking in Contemporary America (Russell Sage Foundation, revised edition, 2001). She teaches American labor, urban and women's history, and has taught quantitative
history since the late 1970s. She taught Quantitative Historical Analysis in the ICPSR Summer Program from 1991 to 1995 and from 1996 to 2001, and she also served as a member (1998-2003) and Chair (2000-2002) of the ICPSR Council. In 2006 she served as the President of the Social Science History Association. Her current research focuses on the use of population data in time of war and the ethical issues surrounding public data use.