Statistical confidentiality is a fundamental principle of official statistics enshrined in the Treaty and in the European statistics Code of Practice. Harmonisation of principles and guidelines as regards protection of confidential data is the obligation of Eurostat and national statistical authorities in the European Statistical System.

Statistical disclosure control can be defined as measures applied on the data to eliminate (or reduce) the risk of disclosing information on the individual statistical units (respondents). These measures usually modify or restrict the amount of the data released.

The objective of the Centre of Excellence (CoE) on statistical disclosure control (SDC) is to bring together statistical authorities interested in collaboration on SDC projects. The CoE will be implemented by means of the specific grant agreements (SGA) focused on the issues of interest to the whole European Statistical System, in particular:
1)    Microdata protection
2)    Tabular data protection
3)    Output checking rules
4)    Tools for SDC
5)    Access to confidential data
6)    Treatment of statistical confidentiality in particular statistical domains

The first project carried out by the project team concerns development of public use files (PUF) for EU-SILC and EU-LFS data. The website devoted to the PUF project can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/public-use-files-eurostat-micr...

The second project aims at user support for and maintenance of SDC tools. More details can be found here.