POTENTIAL PRIVACY LAPSE FOUND IN AMERICANS’ 2010 CENSUS DATA

WASHINGTON, D. C.: An internal team at the Census Bureau found that basic personal information collected from more than 100 million Americans during the 2010 head count could be reconstructed from obscured data, but with lots of mistakes, a top agency official disclosed Saturday. The age, gender, location, race and ethnicity for 138 million people were potentially vulnerable. So far, however, only internal hacking teams had discovered such details at possible risk, and no outside groups were known to have grabbed data intended to remain private for 72 years, chief scientist John Abowd told a scientific conference. The Census Bureau is now scrapping its old data shielding technique for a state- of-the-art method that Abowd claimed is far better than Google’s or Apple’s. Some former agency chiefs fear the potential pri-

vacy problem will add to the worries that people will avoid answering or lie on the once- every-10-year survey because of the Trump administration’s attempt to add a much- debated citizenship question.