Before we publish any statistic, we apply safeguards that help prevent someone from being able to trace that statistic back to a specific respondent.

We call these safeguards “disclosure avoidance,” although these methods are also known as “statistical disclosure controls” or “statistical disclosure limitations.”

Although it might appear that a published table shows information about a specific individual, the Census Bureau has taken steps to disguise the original data in such a way that the results are still useful. These steps include using statistical methods such as “data swapping” and “noise injection.”