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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

#151

Post by giancarlostoro »

bilbo0s wrote: post #90
conception wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion. Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going. When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immi…

Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data.

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

#152

Post by gkbrk »

baq wrote: post #119
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…

For decades we were encrypting our communications with rsa, surely nothing is wrong with it?

There is nothing wrong with it, and RSA is still commonly used. In fact, RSA is better against quantum computers compared to ECC.

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

#153

Post by kajman »

bpt3 wrote: post #72
tbrownaw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers. This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced? As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

There's not many cases of enforcement. Non-response is taken about as seriously as the Robinson–Patman act. I think the Census Bureau is very reliant on people thinking there will be enforcement, however, which is why the materials they send all have a threatening aura. I don't know about the ACS, but for the decennial census I often felt like my job as an enumerator was just to bother people until they'd answer. The case would keep being recycled until we got at least (IIRC) a head count.

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

#154

Post by YeahThisIsMe »

estearum wrote: post #102
whattheheckheck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Voting and getting everyone you know to vote

The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.

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

#155

Post by everforward »

willmadden wrote: post #131
newZWhoDis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)? You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people? Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right? "The…

I'm not sure why your comment is grayed out. Cell tower data, credit bureau integration, social media scraping, palantir, smart home device surveillance, DNA database exploitation, facial recognition networks, tax, payroll, passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases and many more... The census is a historical relic used to jerrymander congressional seats, and that's about it.

Census data provides a reliable source to build off of, which makes joining between data sets more reliable. A lot of what you're talking about would be partial prints of an identity that have to be joined up with others to give reliable data.

Eg

> Cell tower data

That's just going to get you a subscriber and device ID, unless you're talking about going deep packet inspection and parsing the contents of the packets. You could, but that's a lot of effort to get something the census can hand you for free.

> credit bureau integration

Notoriously unreliable and identities for the purpose of credit get stolen constantly. The easiest way to clean that is against known-good info, like the census.

> social media scraping

Half the profiles are fake, also not reliable data unless you clean it up. Again, census data makes it very easy to cut out profiles that don't match a real person.

> tax, payroll

These are probably fairly reliable, although they usually won't tell you about a person's demographics.

> passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases

There's an enormous part of the population that won't appear in these at all. The huge part of the country that's "working poor" but not poor enough for Medicaid probably aren't traveling internationally. I wouldn't be surprised if half the country doesn't appear in any of these.

The census has value in that it contains a huge depth of information, is tied with your identity, citizens are compelled by law to answer so even the privacy folks have to respond and lying on it is a crime (enforcement is probably non-existent, though).

I'm sure that can all be reconstructed to some level of accuracy given sufficient effort, but that's a lot harder and requires a ton more coordination than "SELECT * FROM census_data WHERE ..."

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

#156

Post by hristov »

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…

As the article clearly states, privacy features have been in the census since 1990. It is just that the previously used privacy feature was not very strong and could be defeated. So it was replaced by a stronger feature in 1920. Before 1990 the census. 1990 was when personal computers were being popularized and the computing power available to individuals exploded and so then it was possible to use computers to separate out individual information from the data the census publishes. So the issue came up then.

No it is not an overblown problem.

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

#157

Post by webnrrd2k »

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.

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

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

#158

Post by wpollock »

nojito wrote: post #95
wpollock wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions. I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments…

>And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions. There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets. The last thing people should support is creating of profiles of individuals by combining data from different government agencies. This is why the census is so important as a data col…

> There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.

This is an excellent point. In my opinion, such laws are a good idea. Most of the time, policy decisions should not require IRS data. (Or other personal data.)

But to get around such laws, the government asks citizens to provide that data a second time (in the census). And sometimes it's asked yet again on other forms. This seems to defeat the purpose of those laws.

I can see that federal disaster aid might need to know if some area needs more or less aid, depending on the wealth of the area receiving aid. If aid is given to individuals, the have a need to know the individuals' income.

When there is a reasonable need to know, I would prefer the government use the much more accurate IRS data, rather than ask for people's income multiple times. The laws preventing merging federal datasets could be rethought, given what is now known about preserving privacy mathematically. I would like to see specific exemptions made, with the provided data properly anonymized to preserve privacy while serving the legitimate purpose for which the data was requested. The use of such data should require a request to congress for it.

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

#159

Post by comex »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #69
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.

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

It happened a year ago in this country, with IRS sharing data with ICE (breaking a longstanding policy of keeping taxpayer data private within the government).

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

#160

Post by bpt3 »

aesthesia wrote: post #97
bpt3 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced? As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

They can certainly enforce that you answer the survey. But it's very difficult to enforce a requirement that people answer questions accurately, particularly when they perceive that doing so will expose them to danger.

I don't get what danger is being referenced here that exists only if the data is released to the public (in aggregate)?

The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.

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