> DAO-216-26 bans differential privacy and other modern (and not so modern) techniques. It restricts disclosure avoidance techniques to “coarsening,”
> DAO-216-26 forbids “noise infusion”, described as “methods that involve modifying a dataset by adding random values, or noise.”
> By forbidding noise infusion, the directive bans the disclosure avoidance techniques at the core of dozens of data releases over the last three decades.
> Civil servants will do their best to comply with this order while still following the laws that require them to protect the confidentiality of respondents’ data. To balance these competing mandates, they may seek to produce less data or coarsen data so much that it is unusable. Or they might be pushed by political actors to publish data that can be easily unmasked...
This current administration is cursed.