Now is the time for Privacy Enhancing Technologies to empower official statistics

ObjectivesThere are stark socio-economic and ethnic inequalities in infant mortality rates (deaths less than 1 year of age – IMR) in the United Kingdom (UK).1 Recent estimates show stagnation in...

Our system of official statistics in the UK is one of the most decentralised and elaborate in the world. As well as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), it spans several sizeable centres of expertise in Whitehall departments and in the three devolved administrations; and it embraces agencies such as the Higher Education Statistics Agency and the Information Centre for Health and Social Care, which sit at arms length from central departments. In 2008, legislation establishing a new Statistics Board, with oversight not just of the ONS but of all official figures produced by these bodies, will come fully into force. Richard Alldritt of the Statistics Commission and Richard Laux of the ONS identify some of the challenges facing the statistical system at this time of transition and suggests a course that the Statistics Board might want to steer.

Female farmers play an important role in rural economies, although they are not always statistically recorded. The aim of this article is to look beyond macro statistics and official figures provided for female farming at European Union level and try to provide a clearer picture of social and economic efficacy and transformation of the situation for women in agriculture at local level. In Greece, one-third of the agricultural holdings belong to female farmers according to the official statistics. However, the official national statistics which monitor women in agriculture give a macro description of the situation, prone to mistakes and obscure readings of the reality. For this purpose, a concerted effort is made to elaborate on the main characteristics of female farms and their transformations at local level through the past years reading beyond the official statistical data and delving into the field research. The above is accomplished by means of local key-informants and qualitative techniques in one of the most dynamic agricultural areas in Greece, and one that holds a percentage of female farms above the national figure. Research shows that the situation for female farmers has improved during the last decade, but they still face a constellation of problems along with social exclusion, especially in villages of the study area with particular cultural characteristics. All in all, it seems that local cultural standards and values affect the overall integration of women in agriculture despite all incentives and contemporary policies.

In this paper, the author aims to describe the dissemination of microdata from the population census by National Statistical Offices. This type of data is highly confidential, and approaches to protection vary across the world. National Statistical Offices mostly strive to publish their data as much as possible, but they are bounded by national and international laws to protect the personal data of respondents. The primary goal is mapping the differences between countries and their categorization. Different approaches to microdata availability are described, and various data access approaches are depicted. The information was obtained from publicly available documentation and a survey in which selected statistical offices were contacted. Discovered were that of the 223 countries (including dependent territories), 100 countries have made microdata available for the scientific community, with 30 countries also providing microdata access to the public. This paper presents a mapped overview and aggregated information on the publication of microdata of the population census from around the world.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Synthetic Data

In 2016, the mean annual pay for all doctors working full time in the UK was £78 386, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS data show that 78% of doctors work full time. For the remaining 22% who work part time, the …

In the UK, the true impact of cardiac and sudden death in the young (<or=35 years) is speculative. The authors critically appraised the office of national statistics (ONS) data for causes of death in the 1-34 years age group in England and Wales in an attempt to present an estimate of the incidence of such deaths and their underlying causes. The investigators analysed the ONS mortality data for 2002-2005, inclusive. International classification of diseases-10 codes representing possible cardiac deaths were selected and divided into four classes; A1: definite cardiac deaths with no structural heart disease identified at post-mortem, A2: definite cardiac deaths with structural heart disease identified at post-mortem, A3: definite cardiac deaths with indeterminate cause, and B: possible cardiac deaths. Analysis of the data revealed an average of 419 (SD 16.5) definite cardiac deaths per annum (Class A1 + A2 + A3) equating to 1.8 per 100,000 per year (SD 0.08) or 8 deaths/week. There were also 433 (SD 6.2) deaths per year in class B which comprised primarily of deaths from drowning and epileptic seizures. The most prevalent causes were ischaemic heart disease (33.5%), cardiomyopathies (27%), sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (14%), myocarditis (11%), valvular heart disease (5%), and hypertensive cardiomyopathy (2%). Our findings suggest that the number of cardiac and sudden deaths in the young identified is sufficiently high to command attention even without the inclusion of potential misclassifications (Class B). Awareness of such deaths among primary-care physicians, pathologists, and coroners should be raised to ensure that those at risk are identified and further tragedies are avoided.

This article examines the impact of the great recession and subsequent economic recovery on the position of women within the labor market in Scotland. In common with other developed economies, Scotland experienced the most serious financial crisis since 1929 and the longest and deepest recession since the early 1930s. Despite this, the economic data would suggest that women’s position in the labor market has improved significantly over recent years as the economy began to recover as there are now a record number of women in employment. However, using secondary literature and official labor market figures, this article argues that the data only tells part of the story since a lot of these jobs could be described as precarious, involving atypical contracts of employment. That is the job does not involve a full– time contract of employment with a single employer for an indefinite period. The article concludes that the increase in women’s participation in the formal labor market has not resulted in a significant improvement in gender equality nor has it led to a redistribution of unpaid work between women and men.

In First World colonised nations such as Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, population statistics form the evidentiary base for how Indigenous peoples are known and 'managed' through state policy approaches. Yet, population statistics are not a neutral counting. Decisions of what and how to count reflect particular assumptions about Indigenous identity, ways of life and wellbeing. More often than not, the requirements and priorities of government take precedence over the informational needs and priorities of Indigenous communities. Whereas National Statistics Offices (NSOs) once rendered Indigenous peoples invisible in official statistics through non-recognition, the more pressing problem in the 21st century is that of misrecognition. In seeking to move beyond statistical misrecognition, we propose a set of guiding principles for bringing government reporting frameworks and Indigenous concepts of identity and wellbeing into closer proximity. We argue that a principled approach to collecting, disseminating and analysing Indigenous data not only avoids misrecognising Indigenous peoples but enhances the functionality of official statistics for Indigenous peoples and NSOs alike.

Abstract. Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies has a tradition of about 25 years. The basic technologies and ideas were found until 1995 while the last decade was dominated by the utilisation of such technolo-gies. The question arises if there is a market for Privacy Enhanced Tech-nology. The answer is yes, however Privacy Enhancing Technology may not have been broadly known yet in order to make it profitable. The gov-ernments or non-profit organisations must therefore run such systems or at least promote their further development and deployment. Especially governments have however conflicting interests: While governments of democratic nations are responsible to keep the freedom of citizens (and privacy as a part of it), governments also need instruments to prose-cute criminal activities. Subsequently, Privacy Enhancing Technologies have to consider law enforcement functionality in order to balance these different targets. 1

Can Cyprus overcome its health-care challenges?

Teenage pregnancy has been labelled as a major social and health problem and has become a key policy area in several industrialized countries. In England, current policy aims (1) to halve teenage pregnancy rates for under-18s by 2010, and (2) to reduce teenage parents’ risk of social exclusion by supporting their participation in education, training and employment. Official statistics are published on the rate of teenage pregnancy but not on the number of teenage mothers. In this paper we calculate the number of teenage mothers aged 15–17 in England in 2001 using routine data on fertility, stillbirths and mortality. We find that there were approximately 30,000 teenage mothers in England in 2001. This is a calculation which could, and should, be produced regularly by the Office for National Statistics. By only producing statistics on the rate of teenage pregnancy and not the number of teenage mothers, the first policy goal is thereby given precedence.

Differential privacy is a popular privacy-enhancing technology that has been deployed both by industry and government agencies. Unfortunately, existing explanations of differential privacy fail to set accurate privacy expectations for data subjects, which depend on the choice of deployment model. We design and evaluate new explanations of differential privacy for the local and central models, drawing inspiration from prior work explaining other privacy-enhancing technologies such as encryption. We reflect on the challenges in evaluating explanations and on the tradeoffs between qualitative and quantitative evaluation strategies. These reflections offer guidance for other researchers seeking to design and evaluate explanations of privacy-enhancing technologies.

The article presents the idea of the project named European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS), which involves the training of professionals of official statistics on European universities according to a unified program. The concept of EMOS the learning outcomes and competency models with syllabuses and practice plans would be developed in cooperation with Eurostat as the coordinating institution and national statistical offices. Regardless of the chosen university, graduate master’s degree would receive an international certificate of public statistics. The article highlights the key methodological and organizational problems, and the benefits from the project. In addition, actions were described that were carried out to determine the interest in the EMOS initiative as well as guidance of stakeholders with their expectations as future employers. Also the possibility of implementing the project was identified, both from the perspective of higher education institutions and statistical offices.

Organizing official statistics for the 21st century