DatIndexUS: “Late last week, the Department of Commerce quietly issued a sweeping new policy that could reshape how the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) protect the privacy of people and businesses whose information they collect. The policy bars the agencies from using “noise infusion,” a family of privacy-protection techniques that make small, controlled changes to published data so that no individual person, household, or business can be reidentified from publicly accessible datasets. One such technique that has garnered some controversy in the past is known as “differential privacy.” That may sound technical. But the stakes are simple: federal statistical agencies are required to do two things at once. They must protect confidential information, and they must publish useful public data. By taking away one of the tools agencies use to do both, the likely result is not “better data.” It may be less data, or less useful data…”