The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way.

It’s a census: it just asks questions.

If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

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.

Disenfranchise who? Something I find interesting is that Europe and the United States are experiencing the largest migration in human history yet no one talks about this. Taking a step back, looking at it from a systems perspective, the migrations are working as planned. Designed to subvert Democracy. What does it mean to have a vote when you import 10 new voters who disagree with you?

Does anyone actually believe this crap?

You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?

You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people?

Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right?

"The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about.

It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.

Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style?

I have to agree. I'd like Census data to be private, but the cat is out of the bag.

I'm all for keeping all of this data private. But to think it isn't already available is a bit 'head in sand'. Maybe put laws in place for 'general' privacy across all data, before getting too inflamed about Census in particular.

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

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.

I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective.

Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.

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.

Congress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that.

You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.

Isn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.

Pretty sad, in my opinion. 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. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.

I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise.

I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse.

We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.

Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble.

"What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .

Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.

Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.

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

I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined".

Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.

> 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.

i have such a hard time reconciling stuff like this:

> The census bureau decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census

and:

> The consequences will be dire for utility or for privacy, and possibly both. It's hard to understate this point: future statistical releases will either be useless compared to past ones, or they will be incredibly unsafe

so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.” and for the last census only we added some privacy items. but if we remove just one of those filters, we are in “dire” circumstances? but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

this makes it feel like an emotional overblown problem

> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. Maybe banning it is a way of pretending that the problem doesn't exist, in the hope that it will go away?

Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.

The dueling political demands of accuracy and privacy are simply incompatible at some level. After reading this, maybe Hanlon's Razor isn't the right standard. Besides malice and stupidity, there is impossibility. Some problems just aren't solvable under certain constraints. I don't envy the statisticians tasked with finding a politically palatable solution to a math problem.

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!

Yeah, the main issue with differential privacy is that you need competent government officials making decisions who understand math beyond a high school level.

It offers a mathematical description of a policy tradeoff, and the policy makers are apparently setting one of the parameters to zero.

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.")

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.

The removal of his name is not performative since we're in the thick of a cult of personality president (at a bare minimum).

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).

So you seem to have at least a surface level of understanding of incentives.

Check this then:

If the census is responsible for allocating federal funds and congressional apportionment, what are the incentives for making census data private and encouraging people that would otherwise hide their identity?

And you seem to not realize that a census has a much wider impact than allocation of federal funds. It’s a nationwide survey done once every 10 years. No other survey compares in scale.

Now think about the data you could collect and the decisions you could make based on this data to ensure a better future for all in this country; in fact, this is a stated goal of the survey that you either didn’t know about or are willfully ignoring.

On the flip side, think about the repercussions of tainting this data and basically wasting such a valuable chance that won’t come around again for another 10 years.

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.)

First off the census is used for determining how many seats are used for congressional apportionment and allocating federal funds.

So unless you're willing to also say that counted illegals cannot used for either of those, then you're just being obtuse.

But if we can agree that they cannot be used for that then sure, lets identify and count them. If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?

"If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?"

You're trading a chance of accuracy (good faith handling of data) for a guarantee of non-accuracy

Frankly i see no reason to keep this data private. They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc...

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

There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is simply not one of those things.

publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.

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.

This seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.

I don't think the question "Has this person given birth to any children in the past 12 months?" would look good on a tax return.

> 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.

I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.

Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.

The census isn't for helping the country make any decisions other than determining the number of representatives and apportionment of taxes. It should not be collecting any data that isn't necessary for that.

I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though.

I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.

Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.

> Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced?

As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

But why is the census asking about those attrbutes at all. The Constitution requires a count. That's it. A number. We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.

> We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.

But we do. A detailed census is essential for making good policy. For example, knowing the age and distribution of children across the country helps local and state governments decide where to put the next school or children's hospital. The federal govt. allocates funds for education and daycare accordingly.

The census is the best and most important measure of govt. policy. Taking it away would leave everyone worse off.

The risks of abuse are too high and historically proven to happen eventually. There are many other ways to determine where schools and hospitals are needed, such as aggregate enrollment and admission statistics.

Census participation is not voluntary. Failure to provide complete or accurate data is, in theory, punishable by a fine. Last census, I intentionally provided incomplete data on the web form, which resulted in a person with a clipboard and some stern questions showing up at my door.