The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson

Legal Safeguards

Legal provisions designed to protect the confidentiality of many kinds of information reported to statistical agencies are a standard feature of any modern national statistical system. The content, status, and effectiveness of these provisions vary from country to country. In terms of scope, these legal safeguards usually focus on identifiable microdata provided by the responding public. In some countries the enforcement is assigned to an independent privacy commission. As already indicated, in a few countries these laws and regulations even extend to barring the collection or storage of data on sensitive topics. In other countries, whatever external oversight exists is only advisory.

In normal times these laws appear to work well. However, in times of perceived national crisis legal safeguards can be set aside by legislative action or decree or are simply ignored. In the United States, both in World War I and II, the provisions of the census act that called for the confidentiality of data collected by the Census Bureau were set aside by the War Powers Acts adopted after the United States entered each war (Okamura, 1981). Yet even before the Second War Powers Act was introduced in Congress early in 1942, the director of the Census Bureau indicated his willingness to ignore the law so as to provide defense authorities a way of checking confidential census information on individual Japanese Americans (Seltzer and Anderson, 2000). The situation is even more precarious if a country is occupied or controlled by a foreign power.

Ethical Safeguards

Ethical safeguards in terms of agreed-on normative standards serve two quite different functions. First, they can remind statisticians and others responsible for statistical and related data systems that there are underlying professional norms that need to be considered in our daily work. Awareness of these norms helps to keep us from inadvertently crossing the boundary into socially harmful activities as we become caught up in the pursuit of our scientific, career, bureaucratic, or other professional interests. Second, pre-existing statements of ethical norms can also serve as a rallying point when legal and other safeguards appear to be overwhelmed in times of national hysteria.

Currently, a solid body of national and international statements of ethical norms exists to which statisticians and data users can refer. They include, at the international level, the "Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics" adopted by the United Nations Statistical Commission (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1994) and the "Declaration of Professional Ethics" adopted by the International Statistical Institute (ISI) (1986). At the national level, examples from France (Association des Administrateurs de 1'INSEE, 1985), the United Kingdom (Royal Statistical Society, 1993), and the United States (American Statistical Association, 1999) may be cited. The auspices of these national norms include national statistical societies, government statistical agencies or their staffs, and individual private-sector statisticians. The bibliography attached to the ISI declaration provides a useful, if dated, review of national ethical norms in the field of statistics. Analogous statements of ethical norms also exist for many of the social sciences, although none has been specifically developed for demography or the population field more generally.