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An American Privacy Emergency

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#81

Post by panicinducer »

Fomite wrote: post #23
alexpotato wrote: post #18

One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress: Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it. Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is. One group it's NOT popular w…

One of the things I have found so alarming about a lot of recent revelations is just how cheap congress goes for.

This gets it a bit backwards, the money is a reward for playing along within the system, not a straight cash-for-policy transaction.

If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#82

Post by thisisit »

anonymousiam wrote: post #28
alexpotato wrote: post #18

One of my favorite recently learned facts about Congress: Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it. Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is. One group it's NOT popular w…

Free housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

It might come as a shock to you then that running government or military or any government service requires “somebody else needs to pay for them”. Let’s get rid of those too. Long live anarchy.

Fact is people who spout this nonsense are simply selfish people with “F you, got mine” mindset. They hide their selfishness in garb and call others socialist.

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#84

Post by dash2 »

kg wrote: post #66
bo1024 wrote: post #31

What is the political goal behind this directive? I assume there is some completely non-subtle purpose, but I can't tell what it is.

The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.

Alternative take that was expressed in the other post on this: census data users found DP extremely hard to work with, and viewed it as an imposed solution from the ivory tower. I wonder if any user could chime in on this.

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#85

Post by zmgsabst »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #79
kg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.

> so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please You mean like by race, gender, and sexual orientation, and using statistical analysis to portray a group of oppressors vs. oppressed, perpetrators and victims? Exactly what was happening via official public policy for the last 4 years while the progressives cheered it on?

[flagged]

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#86

Post by dmvdoug »

zkmon wrote: post #74

> If followed, this order will destroy the Commerce public data our nation relies on for important decisions, such as where to build necessary services for our community’s well-being So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.

Can’t release data sets if they can’t be sufficiently anonymized so as to avoid Privacy Act/other non-disclosure statutes. Can’t anonymize data sets sufficiently if you’re banned from using the techniques data people use when anonymizing data sets. Not that difficult to follow.

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#87

Post by Sniffnoy »

zkmon wrote: post #74

> If followed, this order will destroy the Commerce public data our nation relies on for important decisions, such as where to build necessary services for our community’s well-being So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.

This is guest post by Cynthia Dwork; that's Dwork's writing, not Aaronson's.

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#88

Post by jhhh »

The article presents two possible methods to protect privacy in a dataset. It then attacks a theoretical weakness in a contrived scenario in the old method, which intends to incline us to choose the other, newer solution. The article does not describe in detail the newer solution beyond its name. I have have questions that the article doesn't cover in enough detail: 1) Has the coarsening failed in the way described in the article in practice which leaked information? 2) How does the 'other' solution we're expected to desire work? 3) What is an example of the difference in level of detail offered by the newer solution that was not possible when the data needed to be coarsened in practice?

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#89

Post by hiddencost »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #76
nl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? We do GDPR-compliant reporting by using differential privacy to provably remove PII.

Your sentence reads weird, like if you're missing some key words or context.

"Differential privacy" is the technology they are referring to. Their English is fine, you're the one missing something.

Re: An American Privacy Emergency

#90

Post by flowercalled »

jhhh wrote: post #88

The article presents two possible methods to protect privacy in a dataset. It then attacks a theoretical weakness in a contrived scenario in the old method, which intends to incline us to choose the other, newer solution. The article does not describe in detail the newer solution beyond its name. I have have questions that the article doesn't cover in enough detail: 1) Has the coarsening failed in the way described i…

(1) "A Simulated Reconstruction and Reidentification Attack on the 2010 U.S. Census" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.11283

(2) By adding carefully tuned Gaussian noise. In the last 6 years we have also figured out how to add much less Gaussian noise: "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08986

(3) This one is harder to answer, since the Census Bureau aimed to release the same style of statistics as in previous decades. So the goal of 2020 was to release the same statistics with the same error bounds. Evidence suggests they succeeded in doing this. "Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods" http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07521, "Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decennial Census" http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01320

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