The census count is hugely important, helping with the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives and distribution of billions of dollars in federal money. The 8 billion pieces of statistics in census data are supposed to jumbled in a way so what is released publicly for research cannot identify individuals for more than seven decades. In 2010, the Census Bureau did this by swapping similar household information from one city to another, according to Duke University statistics professor Jerome Reiter. He said the 2010 census used the best possible privacy protection available, but hackers since then have become more skilled in reconstructing data. Georgetown University provost Robert Groves, who headed the 2010 census, said the count had the proper privacy and that every census improves.

Source: Economic Times February 16, 2019 20:15 UTC