To protect the confidentiality of 2020 Census respondents, the U.S. Census Bureau plans to use a framework termed "differential privacy". The IPUMS team is concerned about the potential impacts of this approach on the scope and quality of census data products.

To help data users assess the impacts of differential privacy, the Census Bureau has released 2010 demonstration data products, which supply differentially private versions of 2010 data.

To facilitate comparisons, we provide both the original and differentially private 2010 data joined together in a simplified format through the links below.

We encourage users to provide feedback about the demonstration data by emailing the Census Bureau. If you send input, please email a copy to IPUMS at nhgis+diffpriv@umn.edu. Several assessments of the demonstration data were presented at the Workshop on 2020 Data Products (December 11-12, 2019) organized by the Committee on National Statistics.

Features of the NHGIS Demonstration Files:

We have separated the data for different geographic summary levels into individual files

The data files include standard NHGIS "GISJOIN" identifiers and NHGIS variable codes for both the original and demonstration data

The ZIP archives contain human-readable codebooks describing the contents of the data files

"Wide" files place each data variable in a separate column. "Long" files place each data variable on a separate row (so each row corresponds to a single geographic unit and single data variable).

Coverage: Geographic Levels: 11 levels selected from the "National" Demographic and Housing Demonstration File and 3 levels selected from the "State" Demographic and Housing Demonstration File Tables: All tables from the 1st (P1-P19, P22-P23) and 14th (H1-H13) segments of the Demographic and Housing Demonstration File



Update on February 4, 2020 - We re-released the NHGIS Demonstration Files to account for an NHGIS processing error. Details are available here.

* - The long version of the block group file is too large to distribute through our website.

Please direct any comments or questions about these files to nhgis+diffpriv@umn.edu.

Additional Resources:

The Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) also provides reformatted versions of the 2010 Demonstration Data, including all segments and all geographic summary levels, but organized differently.

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