For The U.S. Census, Keeping Your Data Anonymous And Useful Is A Tricky Balance

As the country waits for more results from last year's national head count, the U.S. Census Bureau is facing an increasingly tricky balancing act.

How will the largest public data source in the United States continue to protect people's privacy while also sharing the detailed demographic information used for redrawing voting districts, guiding federal funding, and informing policymaking and research for the next decade?

Concerns have been brewing among census watchers about how the bureau will strike that balance, beginning with the redistricting data it's on track to put out by mid-August.

That release is expected to be the first set of 2020 census statistics to come with controversial new safeguards that bureau officials say are needed to keep people anonymous in publicly available data and prevent the exploitation of their personal information. But based on early tests, many data users are alarmed that the new privacy protections could render some of the new census statistics useless.