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The data they are collecting related to demographics is beyond what is necessary for congressional apportionment. If they collected only the required data; then there would not be a need to fuzz it.
The Census tried to move heaven and earth to contact us. We avoided them like the plague.
Imagine my surprise when i heard that our state had lost a house seat, due to being 80 people short of the required population count to keep its prior state house seat apportionment.
By avoiding the Census, we were able to change the machine of bureacuracy far better than by regular voting.
Sometimes the winning move, is really not to play.
> unless you are a weirdo living off the grid, basic Census-style information about where you live, your age, marital status, and race and gender identities is widely available to commercial actors. Being able to doxx with PII was shown to be able to be done in the suburbs, so this is more accurately phrased as "anyone in low-density suburbs and below are at-risk." If the author doesn't care about that, then just say…
Ross Anderson's Security Engineering Chapter 9 is all about this https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf (Anderson releases the textbook free online)
This is a fairly well developed field (i.e., in medicine there highly screened "Medical Statisticians" who give data to research groups only after it's properly anonymized. They know beforehand what the researchers are interested in, and introduce noise that effects all the measures _except_ the ones the researchers said they were interested in looking at beforehand.
> The idea behind the differential privacy strategy, as I understand it, is that you can basically introduce statistical noise into the block-level results in a way that will make it impossible to reverse-engineer the demographic profile of people who live at specific addresses.
>This has, I think, roughly zero real-world privacy value
This was painful to read...
I have similar hesitations about registering to vote in my state (North Carolina) because it makes voter record data available to “Any person upon request and for a fee. Free lists are provided upon request to political parties.” [1]. My name, address, etc. ended up on dozens of sketchy websites after registering to vote previously. Privacy conscious legislation can’t come soon enough. [1]: https://www.ncsl.org/resea…
If the government knows it, the same data should be available to all citizens. Traffic camera feeds, voter data, medicare claims, everything. With minor, very narrow restrictions for the very latest military secrets.
> unless you are a weirdo living off the grid, basic Census-style information about where you live, your age, marital status, and race and gender identities is widely available to commercial actors. Being able to doxx with PII was shown to be able to be done in the suburbs, so this is more accurately phrased as "anyone in low-density suburbs and below are at-risk." If the author doesn't care about that, then just say…
The author doesn't care about that and says it pretty clearly. He doesn't (and I don't) think that it makes sense to think in terms of "deanonymization attacks" here, since your legal name, address, and basic demographic information are already semi-publicly linked together in a large variety of ways. Is it deanonymization if I go to the county registrar and pull the deed for someone's house?
You can deanonymize block level data and the study shows as much. You just need to have some amount of information that is either unique or low enough in distribution.
There's a tutorial on Twitter if you'd like to follow: https://mobile.twitter.com/john_abowd/status/111494218027827...
One thing that annoyed me in particular was their creepy obsession around race. Even once you answer, "White", there are several more questions aimed at determining precisely what subcategory of white person you are.
If anyone at the census is listening, here's some advice. If you only get to ask Americans a handful of question once every ten years, don't waste half of them trying to figure out someone's 50 shades of whiteness.
The Census has really lost the thread. The original mission was simply to do a headcount to determine how many representatives and electoral votes each state was entitled to. One thing that annoyed me in particular was their creepy obsession around race. Even once you answer, "White", there are several more questions aimed at determining precisely what subcategory of white person you are. If anyone at the census is l…
It seems as thought this author has never read any materials on inference control... Ross Anderson's Security Engineering Chapter 9 is all about this https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf (Anderson releases the textbook free online) This is a fairly well developed field (i.e., in medicine there highly screened "Medical Statisticians" who give data to research groups only after it's properly anonymized.…
> unless you are a weirdo living off the grid, basic Census-style information about where you live, your age, marital status, and race and gender identities is widely available to commercial actors. Being able to doxx with PII was shown to be able to be done in the suburbs, so this is more accurately phrased as "anyone in low-density suburbs and below are at-risk." If the author doesn't care about that, then just say…
The author doesn't care about that and says it pretty clearly. He doesn't (and I don't) think that it makes sense to think in terms of "deanonymization attacks" here, since your legal name, address, and basic demographic information are already semi-publicly linked together in a large variety of ways. Is it deanonymization if I go to the county registrar and pull the deed for someone's house?
The deanonymization/reidentification attacks rely on joining census data against commercial datasets to produce something beyond what either contains. It's not accurate to say this information is already semi-public, because a good deal of it is not.