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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

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Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#21

Post by abletonlive »

simonw wrote: post #6
Pragmata wrote: post #3

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 s…

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 fo…

[flagged]

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#22

Post by SoftTalker »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #10
Pragmata wrote: post #3

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 s…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#23

Post by knollimar »

abletonlive wrote: post #14
simonw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#26

Post by SoftTalker »

simonw wrote: post #6
Pragmata wrote: post #3

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 s…

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 fo…

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.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#27

Post by Sol- »

delichon wrote: post #5

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!

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#28

Post by derektank »

asolove wrote: post #13

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 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.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#29

Post by abletonlive »

Cyph0n wrote: post #17
abletonlive wrote: post #4

There will be a bunch of people that start off with the premise that this data should be private and make following arguments based on this premise. So I'll just go ahead and ask, give me good reasons why this data should be private? My guess is that most of you think we should be counting illegals because they should have representation. And I reject that

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?

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#30

Post by righthand »

Pragmata wrote: post #3

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 s…

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.
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