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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

#181

Post by dwaltrip »

monitorlizard wrote: post #173
gambiting wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is why the government shouldn't have this data at all in the first place.

Say you get your way, and, for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America, the US stops collecting any data on its citizens. How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? Data privacy is a real concern, but you need PII to run government services ef…

They should follow the principle of least privilege. Why not use differential privacy?

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

#182

Post by esseph »

kajman wrote: post #139
cj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data mining companies? Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.

I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so…

It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling.

https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h...

> Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses:

> Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers.

> The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court.

> Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.

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

#183

Post by iririririr »

talon8635 wrote: post #125
Rygian wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point might be going over my head… why does it make no sense?

why it makes sense? please try to answer. what action of the gov would change based on that data?

then, make it so your answer is more valid than if they asked what you usually have for breakfast.

i guarantee you more gov actions can be positively impacted by the breakfast question than the religion one.

the ONLY use for religious data is to get it for free for campaigns.

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

#184

Post by LoganDark »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #178
monitorlizard wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you get your way, and, for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America, the US stops collecting any data on its citizens. How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? Data privacy is a real concern, but you need PII to run government services ef…

> How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? How does knowing your religious affiliation help them with any of this?

"Collecting data" is what helps them.

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

#185

Post by iso1631 »

Bratmon wrote: post #94
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #50

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 .

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

That's where you hope people like Rene Carmille are around. S

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

#186

Post by zimpenfish »

deaux wrote: post #138
p-e-w wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.

> Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zer…

> 2024 [...] the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term.

You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate? Even though a swing of 115k votes would have handed the presidency to Harris instead?

It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...

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

#187

Post by throwawayffffas »

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 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.

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #50

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 .

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by throwawayffffas »

Bratmon wrote: post #94
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #50

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 .

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

Exactly why a government may refrain from collecting such data, as it is not even relevant in any kind of policy decision.

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

#190

Post by ThePhysicist »

hristov wrote: post #162
ThePhysicist wrote: post #105

I think it should be noted that there was a lot of dissatisfaction from users of the census data as far as I know. So it's not been banned just for politicals sake or because they hate privacy... Some people I talked to in the privacy field even called the whole thing a total disaster and weren't shy to put blame on John Abowd who apparently pushed this through despite a lot of internal opposition and concerns. Not s…

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 somew…

Are you sure about that? You are saying that differentially private census data couldn't be used for gerrymeandering and advertisement while non differentially private data could? Hard to believe, I'm not an advertisement or gerrymeandering expert but I would assume people running ads or cutting up districts are mostly interested in aggregate statistics i.e. they won't care about single households? And I would assume they can rely on voter files, party databases etc... And to the contrary there are reports [1] that indicate differential privacy actually makes gerrymeandering analysis more difficult or impossible. So, not really an argument for differential privacy, discriminatory action can be equally well taken based on differentially private data as the government cares about groups not individuals and groups aren't protected by differential privacy. It seems people really fundamentally misunderstand what this technique can achieve and what it won't do.

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8494446/?utm_source...

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