One the nation’s most authoritative sources for residential address data, the U.S. Census Bureau, may soon have to confront a costly legal constraint that prevents it from sharing basic street address information with thousands of county, state governments and other organizations.
The limitation not only means that state and local governments must spend more to validate address information, so must the Census Bureau and other federal agencies, according to a group of data specialists speaking at a conference on the use of geographic data.
“We share the geography, but we can’t share the information about the geography,” said Joshua Lieberman, senior manager, geospatial analytics at Deloitte.
That constraint comes in the form a privacy protection law, referred to as Title 13. It makes it against the law for the Census Bureau to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business, including address information and GPS coordinates.
