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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

#261

Post by adastra22 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #206
throwawayffffas wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely you know the history being referenced here.

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

#262

Post by estearum »

rectang wrote: post #210
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.

Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates. RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate. It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help. ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is ha…

100% -- RCV is a super important part of this equation in the long run.

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

#263

Post by gadders »

simonw wrote: post #6
Pragmata wrote: post #3

Frankly i see no reason to keep this data private. They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc... Fundamentally this is public data. If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is. There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is s…

How hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe fo…

This is the real reason for the fudging of the data. People don't want an ethnicity/citizenship status/birth country breakdown of things like benefit use.

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

#264

Post by asdff »

esseph wrote: post #180
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…

> 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.

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

#265

Post by harrall »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #206
throwawayffffas wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants.

It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out.

Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly for decision making, even if the intention is good, and the intentions have also been very bad.

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

#266

Post by cyberax »

throwawa1 wrote: post #230
airstrike wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely

One example is HIAS who runs a fully staffed Darién Gap facility. As soon as there is a friendly administration to mass migration - they just flip a switch and we will have 10 millions of migrants. I don't want to come across as MAGA, because I am a non voter - the Republicans fuel the fire with forever wars. Its really two sides of the same coin. Companies benefit, because when there is no social cohesion workers ar…

"Tens of millions"? Really?

Even if we take 20 million, that's 75% of the total population of Venezuela or half of the population of Colombia. There simply are not enough people in South America for these kinds of numbers.

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

#267

Post by arbot360 »

simonw wrote: post #55
jonhohle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.

I don't think the question "Has this person given birth to any children in the past 12 months?" would look good on a tax return.

Isn't that already on the tax return? Your dependent count would increment from the prior year. The IRS can also distinguish births vs adoptions and step children by the checking for novel SSNs.

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

#268

Post by asdff »

everforward wrote: post #155
willmadden wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[dead]

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

#269

Post by adastra22 »

talon8635 wrote: post #204
iririririr wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t religion, for those who follow it (I don’t), one of if not the most important aspects of their identity and life’s purpose? I love breakfast food, but not that much. Don’t some religions not get along very well? Given your criteria, what should be asked? Check the boxes for the physical and mental illnesses you have? What’s your BMI? How much time do you spend online? What percent of your diet is highly process…

They are asking what policy decisions hinge on that religion question. Given 1st amendment protections against government policy that favors one religion over another, I think that’s a fair question to ask.

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

#270

Post by CGMthrowaway »

nirava wrote: post #215
sherburt3 wrote: post #172

So "differential privacy" pretty much sounds like someone gets to modify the results of a census and how it gets modified is entirely up to their discretion. Seems like something that could be abused to achieve political objectives.

there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*. know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thi…

>there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous

I hope so. What are they?

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