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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

#191

Post by vkou »

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.

> 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?

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

#192

Post by dathinab »

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.

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...

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

#193

Post by cheesecakegood »

foolfoolz wrote: post #68

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…

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!)

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

#194

Post by jmalicki »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #187
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 a…

There are plenty of other uses - knowing where to build stores to serve your target market, predicting possible pandemic vulnerabilities, etc.

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

#195

Post by generj »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #174
pelorat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, are you saying Europe doesn't have censuses?

Many countries effectively have a live registry of where people live, updated to within a few weeks. A door to door census isn’t needed because they can do something like:

SELECT a.province, COUNT(DISTINCT b.id_num) FROM registry a INNER JOIN national_id b ON a.nat_id_num = b.id_num WHERE timeframe = 2026-01-01 GROUP BY 1

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

#196

Post by otikik »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #70
conception wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for…

What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?

Making the wealthy scared

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

#197

Post by elictronic »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #187
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 a…

Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.

The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way.

The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.

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

#198

Post by Retric »

gs17 wrote: post #141
estearum wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse.

You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).

Somewhere between just going out to vote and revolution sits moving to an area where your vote counts.

I’ve not quite reached that threshold, but I avoid moving to DC due to the lack of voting rights.

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

#199

Post by dathinab »

bagels wrote: post #59
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 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.

yeah,

and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form.

(1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full

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

#200

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Any privacy-diminishing changes at federal level happening during this administration are for one reason only: to amass more power in Conservative administration/governance. At the federal level it's Project 2025, at the state level it's making sure states stay red and disenfranchise minorities.
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