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The APDU-TFC is charged with educating public data users
on the related issues of confidentiality and access. This includes the
legislative and statutory environment as well as technical issues related
to the appropriate use of aggregate and local area statistics and public-use
microdata files (including files that have been statistically altered
to limit the probability of recovering an individual's identity). The
task force is also charged with communicating the needs of public data
users to government agencies that collect and disseminate data to the
public.
User Education
The APDU-TFC is developing a series of White Papers describing
relevant statutes and pending legislation and a Primer on Data Confidentiality
containing a non-technical explanation of the confidentiality/access debate
and of statistical and technical issues related to disclosure limitation.
Unlike other publications on these issues, the primer is designed to be
accessible to the traditional data librarian or archivist or to the data
user with limited formal training in statistics. Finally, the APDU-TFC
is creating an annotated web-searchable bibliography of relevant publications
and electronic resources which will be made available on this website.
Informing the Legislative and Policy Process
The APDU-TFC is intended to be a vehicle for public data
users to inform the legislative process and policy debate concerning privacy,
confidentiality, and data access. In addition to educating public data
users on technical and legal issues surrounding the confidentiality/access
debate, educational materials developed by the APDU-TFC serve as a jumping-off
point for the task force as it seeks to communicate the needs of public
data users (in terms of content, data quality, and access conditions)
to data producers in a constructive way.
Of particular interest in the near term are user penalties
that could be used to enforce ethical data use and, thereby, protect confidentiality.
Mechanisms for enforcing ethical use include contracts and copyrights
and, of course, comprehensive legal reform which would shift some of the
burden for protection of confidentiality from data producers to data users.
The possibility of distinguishing between different types of users (e.g.,
academic and independent policy researchers vs the general public) will
also be explored with the idea that if fair and transparent criteria for
distinguishing between users can be developed, it might also be possible
to create datasets to which differing levels of confidentiality controls
have been imposed. Academic researchers and policy analysts might, for
example, be given data that is less intensely modified using statistical
disclosure control techniques than datasets intended for public use. Distinguishing
between different types of users may also facilitate development of enforceable
user penalties for unethical use.
Another area of intense interest for the APDU-TFC are policy
reforms which would encourage data producers to dialogue with data users,
to develop systematic processes for determining what data will be released
and the extent to which that data will be modified (e.g., using statistical
disclosure limitation/masking techniques), and, perhaps most importantly,
to reveal those processes and criteria to data users. The objective of
this line of investigation is to ensure that activities of disclosure
review boards are transparent so that data users can formulate requests
for data that are reasonable (from the perspective of protecting data
confidentiality) and useable (from the perspective of independent research
and policy analysts).
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