371–380 of 662 posts
> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. I think he has it backwards here. Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff. I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people ot…
People are bad at making the tradeoff because they consistently underestimate the amount of information that is leaked. Forcing them to leak safe amounts of information is the right way.
Not sharing or collecting the data could in some cases be better but there is clear value in this data so the optimal amount to store and make public is not 0.
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Exactly why a government may refrain from collecting such data, as it is not even relevant in any kind of policy decision.
What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens. Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religio…
I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census. They collect socioeconomic and another but not these. Germany does not do a census at all.
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I did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.
>And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data. The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power). Amazing, innit.
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…
> I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure. Intentionally damaging infrastructure is the recurring theme of this administration.
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> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood. Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?
How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?
Statistics are doubly useless in that context because a given loan officer might process something like 20 loans a year, which is too small a sample size for statistics to show anything with high confidence anyway.
The way people like that get caught is when they incriminate themselves. And the real way you solve that problem is by ensuring a competitive market for loans, so that the economic inefficiency of not giving loans to people who would pay them back actually negatively impacts the institutions that do it, and the borrowers can find numerous other institutions willing to do business with them, instead of the racist loan officer both being the borrower's only option and their bank not suffering consequences from it because the lack of competition allows them to stay in business by also overcharging the customers they accept.
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> 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)? I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal. Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-...
That isn't the census. Census data is stale. These data are not stale. If you no longer qualify for medicaid you need to update medicaid office within 10 days for example.
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…
Believe it or not, mathematical techniques and computational power have increased in the past hundreds of years, not to mention the digitization of everything. Privacy issues that weren’t possible before due to cost are now pennies to exploit. Also keep in mind as it points out people were using census data to drive gerrymandering efforts, so these attacks are real and have been going on for a long time.
I "enumerated" for the last census. Trust in my community was already not high* and I had lots of interesting encounters. I really believed the rather invasive data I was collecting with a friendly face would be used and handled responsibly. I feel for the poor souls that'll sign up to go door to door for 2030 now that the firewalls against weaponizing and monetizing all of our sensitive government data has been torn…
Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from national opinion surveys based on tens of thousands of respondents, to small community surveys. A Census product with the most diverse participation pays off almost infinitely for America. It benefits everyone from national newspapers to rural counties.
If the smallest communities lose what little trust remains in the privacy of the Census, they have the most to lose in all of these ways.