Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from national opinion surveys based on tens of thousands of respondents, to small community surveys. A Census product with the most diverse participation pays off almost infinitely for America. It benefits everyone from national newspapers to rural counties.

If the smallest communities lose what little trust remains in the privacy of the Census, they have the most to lose in all of these ways.

And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.

Countries conduct censuses so they can understand, in great detail, what is going on with the people who make up the country.

With this accurate information, improvement plans can be made, and life can be improved for everyone.

The comments about just making it a head count give a very interesting window into the mentality of many these days. They don’t want to - it can’t fathom how to - make life better.

It’s sad, really

Other comments here about Germany and whatnot falls flat, and short. This is America, and part of it is being ok with your neighbors (unless they're truly insane and release plagues of rabbits or burn themselves out of their homes, but I digress), try to find some common ground even if it's awkward and you have to look the other way about some slights and trespasses.

I don't know how much trouble they went to to "fit" you to the cohort they tasked you with, or how much of a natural fit there was. Did you grow up / do you live in the area? There's an element of "liking" (Cialdini) each other which colors participants' perception of tasks. OTOH nothing like talking to perfect strangers to flex that muscle or find out you really don't have it.

Intentionally damaging infrastructure is the recurring theme of this administration.

It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.

That ideal became tantamount to enabling genocide when the US government breached the confidentiality of the census in order to prison camp the japanese on the basis of their race.

> I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity

It's not even just a question of "all". The state should have the absolute minimum capacity to carry out its necessary tasks. Collecting race (just to give one example of many) of any form is not absolutely necessary and so it should not be done.

> they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them

Because they may be in the future. -- but even that is too strong, the greatest harm perpetrated by state actors has consistently come from trying to "help" rather than intentionally malicious acts.

That frankly sounds more like a failure of enforcement, on top of a failure of the construction of the financial system. Here in Germany, it is absolutely not a common thing that mortgages or the banks holding them get sold like a hot potato towards some other sucker, and thus such a letter would cause immediate suspicion.

Privacy issues that weren’t possible before due to cost are now pennies to exploit. Also keep in mind as it points out people were using census data to drive gerrymandering efforts, so these attacks are real and have been going on for a long time.

One notable thing we have today that we didn't have 100 years ago is a computer. Before, you could reasonably assume that recreating individual records wasn't feasible, at least not on a large scale. You can't assume that now. A 4 digit password was safe for hundreds of years, but it would be a security lability today for the same reason.

(Also, linkage. There are more data sources to cross reference now with the internet and social media and web tracking and hacks - the record footprint of Americans even as recently as the 70s and 80s was dramatically lower!)

If you are choosing hundreds of years ago, when we had no computers and internet, I wonder how we had worse privacy than the surveillance world today.

> so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.”

Yes because we didn't have computers to unearth patterns in the data in a millisecond and politicians could have their career ended for doing the wrong thing, when revealed, instead of being rewarded for it.

No it is not an overblown problem.

It wasn't ok - it's been shown that the data released could individually identify people in releases before the 2010 Census.

Arguably the defaults for differential privacy are too robust but that is a different story.

It is introduced in the public data, not the secret data.

Not sure exactly what you're proposing, but if the noise is added independently to different people, you can just buy multiple copies to reduce it.

There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why so much analysis has gone into differential privacy.

The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.

Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data.

Why?

Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc.

All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1).

At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed?

(1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...

Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion.

Thanks.

The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions.

In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face.

For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses.

1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census.

2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?

Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.

Boy were the Germans happy to find these.

The American obsession with asking for people their perceived origins (AAPI, AA, Latino, ...) is more than weird: it's downright dangerous. Don't fucking ask these questions, and never, ever write it down, especially not with names.

Thankfully, now they can just buy it from data brokers and let Palantir target, so that makes life easier for them

1. How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2020?

2. Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2020 that you did not include in Question 1?

3. Is this house, apartment, or mobile home?

4. What is your telephone number?

5. What is Person 1’s name?

6. What is Person 1’s sex?

7. What is Person 1’s age and what is Person 1’s date of birth?

8. Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?

9. What is Person 1’s race?

Nothing really stops you from lying either.

no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.

https://www.congress.gov/94/statute/STATUTE-90/STATUTE-90-Pg...

People are bad at making the tradeoff because they consistently underestimate the amount of information that is leaked. Forcing them to leak safe amounts of information is the right way.

Not sharing or collecting the data could in some cases be better but there is clear value in this data so the optimal amount to store and make public is not 0.

By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible.

How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?

As the article says anytime you want to enforce privacy, the data becomes somewhat less useful, there is just no way around that.

The point of rights is that we have them and that they should not be trampled upon when they become slightly inconvenient to someone in power.

They weren't prepared for data that was obviously noisy. The data has always been inherently inaccurate, and folks just chose to ignore that previously

know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing.

If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.

I guess someone could fiddle with the noise, but then why not nudge the originals? Or more insidiously, control what is published?

You can of course disagree about what what should actually be part of a transparent public record. (Though I suspect a lot of people post-date what was generally available in a "phone book.")

also, if how would anyone know how accurate the "transparent" number is? if Trump or Thiel can fuck with the fuzzing they can just as do so with the base data.

The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions.

A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home.

If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible.

Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

2. Without noise injection it's rather simple to do statistical attacks to reverse engineer individual entities.

3. This data is and has already been used in the past to undermine democratic systems by targeting and disenfranchising minorities, as well as gerrymandering the US to hell.

4. "Too dangerous to make public, too dangerous to collect" - this is a false dichotomy. To govern effectively you need sensitive data, but it should be collected and used in a way that's safe for the individuals.

5. Macro level aggregates don't need individual exposure, that's why noise, anonymization and statistical functions are fine.

They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.

But the devil is in the details. If we don't want advertisers constructing semi-complete profiles from simple web interactions then why would we publish 330 million census questionnaires for their use?

While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public.

This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed.

Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.

The alternative is to water down the census questions, which also leads you down the same path (i.e. manure as data).

(Do you reject that? As someone who uses the phrase "counting illegals" I imagine you would be interested in knowing what that number is.)