  With vast databases at their disposal, private tech companies can compete
with public statistical agencies to provide population statistics. However,
private companies face different incentives to provide high-quality statistics
and to protect the privacy of the people whose data are used. When both privacy
protection and statistical accuracy are public goods, private providers tend to
produce at least one suboptimally, but it is not clear which. We model a firm
that publishes statistics under a guarantee of differential privacy. We prove
that provision by the private firm results in inefficiently low data quality in
this framework.
