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Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency Sixth Edition (2017) / Chapter Skim
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Practice 8: Protection of the Confidentiality of Data Providers' Information
Pages 97-100

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From page 97...
... A credible pledge of confidentiality for individual and organizational responses is considered essential to encourage high response rates and accuracy of responses from survey participants.76 Moreover, if individual participants have been assured of confidentiality, disclosure of identifiable information about them would violate the principle of respect for persons even if the information is not sensitive and would not result in any social, economic, legal, or other harm (see Practice 7; National Research Council, 2003b:Ch.
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From page 98...
... Code; for the National Agricultural Statistics Service, such provisions are in Title 7. 78 For an example involving the Energy Information Administration, see National Research Council (1993b:185–186)
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From page 99...
... This exclusion for NCES has not been invoked, and its possible effect on survey response rates has not been tested, but its existence is not helpful for the mission of statistical agencies and the need for trust on the part of data providers. Both the perception and reality of agencies' confidentiality protection may be affected by departmental initiatives to consolidate data processing and storage to bolster computer and network security in the federal government, improve the cost-effectiveness of information technology development and maintenance, and protect against cyberattacks.
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From page 100...
... Such work can benefit from close attention to the work of computer scientists, who are developing conceptual frameworks for assessing disclosure risk, along with sophisticated privacy protective techniques for modifying datasets to preserve analytic capabilities for a given privacy guarantee. Although these techniques are not fully mature, they represent a means toward a more structured and less ad hoc way of measuring the effectiveness of alternative disclosure risk reduction procedures and implementing them as appropriate (see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017b:Ch.
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