US bans differential privacy in Census data

# Summary The U.S. Department of Commerce has banned "noise infusion" (differential privacy) from Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis statistical products. Differential privacy, which adds random noise to data to protect individual privacy while maintaining statistical usefulness, was adopted for the 2020 Census to prevent record reconstruction attacks, but the resulting reduced accuracy angered demographers, social scientists, and political operatives who relied on Census data for gerrymandering purposes.