Commerce banned 'noise infusion' from Census data. A privacy researcher says only attackers win (desfontain.es)
Damien Desfontaines walks through a trade with no good side: strip the noise and the only privacy tools left are coarsening and suppression, which gut accuracy for small and minority populations while still leaving the data attackable.
Reconstruction attacks, he notes, are just solving a system of equations, and removing the noise makes that trivial. A privacy-company founder complicates the villain story: the 2020 rollout, he says, was a genuine internal disaster.
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