> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality.

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.

I did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust

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

> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me

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

> I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.

Intentionally damaging infrastructure is the recurring theme of this administration.

This does nothing to make government less powerful.

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.

I’d be more interested in giving my state detailed info, letting them run programs. The country can have aggregate data.

> In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization.

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.

But this article is about a decision to damage the census less. If you value an accurate census, you should be celebrating!

> But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.

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.

> Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise.

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

Nope private data about people is published unintentionally regularly, Netflix history and medical records being some of the notable examples.

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.

imho, one big reason why Data Science as a big org lost clout in tech companies was a tendency to treat DS as gatekeepers of data. Outsourcing the responsibility of stat thinking gave many DS a weird power trip; when one dude gets to decide the trade-offs first without anyone around them needing to understand properly.

> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

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?

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more.

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

The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level.

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

The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.

This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.

This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.

Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.

Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000

Yes.

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...

Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?

It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have.

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

Thanks.

have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.

> they’ll just lie or not answer

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?

You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.

>It’s a census: it just asks questions.

Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

The entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.

Believe it or not, mathematical techniques and computational power have increased in the past hundreds of years, not to mention the digitization of everything.

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.

> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

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.

The concerns here, like most concerns about privacy, are hyperbolic hypothetical hypochondria, until they’re not.

For decades we were encrypting our communications with rsa, surely nothing is wrong with it?

Computers and improvements in data science/machine learning are basically the entire explanation. A LOT of the techniques that we use today to de-anonymize data require computation power not previously available. Even when doable, resources limited scale. Source: statistics degree

(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!)

As the article clearly states, privacy features have been in the census since 1990. It is just that the previously used privacy feature was not very strong and could be defeated. So it was replaced by a stronger feature in 1920. Before 1990 the census. 1990 was when personal computers were being popularized and the computing power available to individuals exploded and so then it was possible to use computers to separate out individual information from the data the census publishes. So the issue came up then.

No it is not an overblown problem.

As far as I recall they did have some measures in place. Differential privacy just made it a bit more robust.

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

Surely any such foreign occupier would just demand the unredacted data?

They don't ask about religious affiliation on the census.

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.

Asking about your religion on the census is against the law in the US:

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...

France used to make plenty of lists. We loved lists. Lists are good. Jews lists? Sure, it's maybe useful one day when we want to do something.

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

"What is your religious affiliation" makes absolutely no sense in a census exercise. IMO.

Read up here for example: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/...

there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*.

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.

Not really, it has to be random in a predetermined fashion to be considered differential privacy. It is reversible in the way that someone shouting over an aicraft producing white noise is intelligible.

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

Of course there will be dissatisfaction from users of the data. Anyone that wants to use census data will prefer less privacy in the data. And anytime privacy is enforced the data becomes less useful. It would be certainly very convenient for both advertisers and gerrymandering political consultants to have detailed data on every citizen.

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.

> serious issues downstream as most researchers and statisticians that ingested the data weren't prepared for receiving noisy data values

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

A lot of countries are really bad at running their census. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-governments-cant-count

Sure, in Europe we don't because we already have databases of all citizens, also recording attributes like race, skin color, religious affiliation or political leaning in a database is highly illegal, both for the government and for private use.

But the strength of differential privacy is that you can now make this tradeoff explicit and quantify it. I always liked it because it offers a mathematical solution to a policy problem, but then of course it's up to us to decide what parameters and tradeoff to choose. Also, some data might just not get published at all if the privacy implications are too problematic, so differential privacy might buy you more signal!

There's a ton of information in the US that is accessible to various degrees--especially through the the deep web much less background investigations. Unless you're a wealthy person who can set up various levels of trusts you can't really hide them.

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.")

It’s highly uncertain what will happen in 950 days.

Representative Beatty serves her own interests and her involvement Kennedy Center naming was just more of the same performative politics she routinely engages in. She's on the verge of being an octogenarian and missed a number of key votes, like the bill that cut funding to NPR, PBS, and other govt. programs. Kudos to her for working to remove Trump's name from the Kennedy Center but she needs to go.

headcount doesn't have to be granular, it has to be accurate. this is about the very useful street- and block-level data.

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.

How hard have you thought about this?

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.

1. People give the information to the government under the expectation that this data is to be kept private or used in such a way that individual targeting is made impossible, you break that expectation and people will lie or won't give you this data.

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 should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc...

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

That's a good default position, and I think should be our starting point.

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?

>If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is.

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.

So do you believe that individual income should be public? Or do you believe that the government should not take income into account for taxation or distribution of benefits?

Then dox yourself right now with your previous census answers and PII. There are several obvious reasons to keep the data private, all you have to do is use your brain.

Don’t quit your day job. One guess as to what gender, sexual orientation, and skin colour you have.

It’s because people are significantly more likely to lie or omit some facts if you don’t guarantee their privacy, which means your census data ends up being worth less than a pile of shit.

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

How about we should be "counting illegals" so that we know how many of them there are?

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