Confidentiality and LED

The Census Bureau safeguards your information — It’s the LAW

• Every person with access to data is sworn by law to protect confidentiality.
• It is against the law to publish or disclose any data that identifies an individual or company – no names…no addresses…no Social Security numbers…no telephone numbers…
• A Federal law, Title 13 of the U.S. Code, provides strong confidentiality protections for all individual information collected by the Census Bureau. Violating this law is a Federal crime with serious penalties, including a prison sentence of up to five years and a $250,000 fine.
• Under Title 13, the Census Bureau collects data solely to produce statistics.

The Census Bureau and the state partners are committed to protecting the confidentiality of the data in the LED files. Technically, the approach to avoid disclosure of individual information is to combine cell suppression methodology with the addition of statistical noise, controlling key measures to county employment levels as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In plainer English, the statistical techniques the Census Bureau uses mean that the actual statistics are not shown if the numbers in a cell are small. Rather, the statistics that are shown are “fuzzy,” that is, close to the actual information but not exact.

Only Census Bureau employees or individuals who have Special Sworn Status are permitted to work with the data. Everyone who has access to Title 13 data must have an official security clearance based on a background check, including fingerprinting. The Census Bureau and state data custodians review all projects before release to avoid disclosure of confidential information.

Supporting Documentation

• Technical Paper No. TP-2006-01 [PDF; File Size: 760MB]
  The LEHD Infrastructure Files and the Creation of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators [PDF; File Size: 760MB]
  Date: January 2006. Author(s): John Abowd, Bryce Stephens and Lars Vilhuber
• Technical Paper No. TP-2003-10 [PDF; File Size: 725KB]
  Synthetic Data and Confidentiality Protection [PDF; File Size: 725KB]
  Date: September 2003, 2003. Author(s): John M. Abowd and Julia I. Lane
• Technical Paper No. TP-2004-03 [PDF; File Size: 462KB]
  New Approaches to Confidentiality Protection Synthetic Data, Remote Access and Research Data Centers [PDF; File Size: 462KB]
  Date: June 2004, 2004. Author(s): John M. Abowd and Julia I. Lane