Data Privacy and Cryptography Experts File Brief in Support of Census Bureau Brief is filed in support of the Department of Commerce's use of differential privacy to protect the confidentiality of 2020 census data News provided by Share this article Share this article BERKELEY, Calif., May 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Twenty leading experts, in data privacy and cryptography along with lawyers from Bondurant Mixson & Elmore filed an amicus brief in support of the Census Bureau's use of "differential privacy"—a mathematically rigorous way of providing provably and future-proof privacy-infused statistics— to protect the privacy of census respondents. Through the lawsuit, the state of Alabama seeks to force the Census Bureau to use out-dated methods for protecting confidentiality—methods which a team of Census Bureau researchers found could be easily broken by deploying modern data reconstruction techniques to published Census statistics. The experts, who include inventors of differential privacy, cryptographers, statisticians, legal experts focused on technology and society document the increased risks of attacks due to the availability of large data sets and computing power available to adversaries, and explain that differential privacy is the only known method capable of preventing such attacks while simultaneously enabling the publication of useful statistics.