Privacy Rollback: US Census Abandons Differential Privacy Standard

The US government's decision to ban differential privacy represents a dangerous abandonment of the gold standard in data protection, risking individual re-identification from publicly released census statistics. This reversal undermines the Census Bureau's own hard-learned lessons from inadequate privacy measures, trading long-term security for short-term utility. The move threatens to weaken privacy safeguards across all federal statistical agencies and erode public confidence in government data protection.