The Risk of Linked Census Data to Transgender Youth A Simulation Study
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Abstract
Every ten years, the United States Census Bureau collects data on all people living in the US, including information on age, sex, race, ethnicity, and household relationship.
We conducted a simulation study to investigate the risk of disclosing a change in how an individual's sex was recorded in successive censuses. In a simulated population based on a reconstruction of the 2010 decennial census of Texas, we compared the number of transgender individuals under 18 identified by linking simulated census data from 2010 and 2020 under alternative approaches to disclosure avoidance, including swapping in 2020 (as used in 2010) and TopDown in 2020 (as used for the actual data released from the 2020 enumeration).
Our simulation assumed that in Texas, 0.2\% of the 3,095,857 residents who were under the age of 8 in the 2010 census were transgender and would have a different sex reported in the 2020 census, and 23\% would reside at the same address, which implied that 1,424 trans youth were at risk of having their transgender identity status disclosed by a reconstruction-abetted linkage attack. We found that without any disclosure avoidance in 2010 or 2020, a reconstruction-abetted linkage attack identified 657 transgender youth. With 5\% swapping in 2010 and 2020, it identified 605 individuals, an 8\% decrease. With swapping in 2010 and TopDown in 2020 as configured for the actual data release, it identified 194 individuals, a 68\% decrease from swapping. Our simulation found that the TopDown configuration attains the maximum achievable level of privacy protection against such an attack.
Our results demonstrate the importance of disclosure avoidance for census data and suggest that the TopDown approach used by the Census Bureau is a substantial improvement compared to the previous approach, achieving the maximum level of privacy protection possible against such a linkage attack.
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