U.S. Broadband Coverage Data Set: A Differentially Private Data Release
This provides a privacy-preserving data set for policymakers and researchers analyzing broadband access, but it is incremental as it applies existing differential privacy methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the need for publicly available broadband coverage data while preserving privacy by introducing a U.S. Broadband Coverage data set at the zip code-level, using differential privacy to protect individual households and including error range estimates without additional privacy loss.
Broadband connectivity is a key metric in today's economy. In an era of rapid expansion of the digital economy, it directly impacts GDP. Furthermore, with the COVID-19 guidelines of social distancing, internet connectivity became necessary to everyday activities such as work, learning, and staying in touch with family and friends. This paper introduces a publicly available U.S. Broadband Coverage data set that reports broadband coverage percentages at a zip code-level. We also explain how we used differential privacy to guarantee that the privacy of individual households is preserved. Our data set also contains error ranges estimates, providing information on the expected error introduced by differential privacy per zip code. We describe our error range calculation method and show that this additional data metric does not induce any privacy losses.