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 simply not one of those things.
publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.
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 for people to respond to as possible.
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.
> 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 agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.
>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 collection mechanism.
> 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.
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.
Have you filled out a federal income tax return in the US?
It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).
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.
The census isn't for helping the country make any decisions other than determining the number of representatives and apportionment of taxes. It should not be collecting any data that isn't necessary for that.
> The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
The key thing you're missing is "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct".
Congress has passed a whole bunch of laws that attach additional responsibilities to the census for the purpose of supporting government decisions.
I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though.
I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.
They haven't stopped but they don't happen immediately.
Detailed census records are published 72 years after they were collected; the last release (of 1950 census data) came out in 2022; the next one should be published in 2032.
The Census Bureau is a lot more than the 10-year Census, and it already makes very extensive use of IRS data and other administrative sources. Virtually everything that is published using these sources uses either differential privacy or other privacy protection methods that are prohibited by the order. I'm guessing that a lot of those pieces of data are just going to be put on hold until the order is reversed or weakened. A number of things might have to go away permanently, as there's almost certainly no way to protect privacy in them without some kind of noise infusion.
TBH I don't think the people who wrote this knew how much collateral impact it would have.
>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.
That seems to me like it's a good thing. Allow people to determine whether the data is actually needed, rather than closing their eyes.
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.
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.
I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.
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.
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.
1. People give the information to the government under the expectation that this data is to be kept private or used in such a way that individual targeting is made impossible, you break that expectation and people will lie or won't give you this data.
2. Without noise injection it's rather simple to do statistical attacks to reverse engineer individual entities.
3. This data is and has already been used in the past to undermine democratic systems by targeting and disenfranchising minorities, as well as gerrymandering the US to hell.
4. "Too dangerous to make public, too dangerous to collect" - this is a false dichotomy. To govern effectively you need sensitive data, but it should be collected and used in a way that's safe for the individuals.
5. Macro level aggregates don't need individual exposure, that's why noise, anonymization and statistical functions are fine.
That's a good default position, and I think should be our starting point.
But the devil is in the details. If we don't want advertisers constructing semi-complete profiles from simple web interactions then why would we publish 330 million census questionnaires for their use?
>If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is.
While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public.
This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed.
Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.
So do you believe that individual income should be public? Or do you believe that the government should not take income into account for taxation or distribution of benefits?
Then dox yourself right now with your previous census answers and PII. There are several obvious reasons to keep the data private, all you have to do is use your brain.
But why is the census asking about those attrbutes at all. The Constitution requires a count. That's it. A number. We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.
> We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.
But we do. A detailed census is essential for making good policy. For example, knowing the age and distribution of children across the country helps local and state governments decide where to put the next school or children's hospital. The federal govt. allocates funds for education and daycare accordingly.
The census is the best and most important measure of govt. policy. Taking it away would leave everyone worse off.
The risks of abuse are too high and historically proven to happen eventually. There are many other ways to determine where schools and hospitals are needed, such as aggregate enrollment and admission statistics.
Local school districts know where they need more or fewer schools. This sort of thing isn't any business or responsibilty of the federal government at all.
Census participation is not voluntary. Failure to provide complete or accurate data is, in theory, punishable by a fine. Last census, I intentionally provided incomplete data on the web form, which resulted in a person with a clipboard and some stern questions showing up at my door.
Seems like the free market does make this problem go away. This is simply one of the (few) instances where there is a freer market in the EU that in the US
>In the European Union, sunscreens are regulated as cosmetics, which means greater flexibility in approving active ingredients. In the U.S., sunscreens are regulated as drugs, which means getting new ingredients approved is an expensive and time-consuming process. Because they’re treated as cosmetics, European-made sunscreens can draw on a wider variety of ingredients that protect better and are also less oily, less chalky and last longer.
You should take this as an opportunity to reflect on the amount of lives lost as a result of the regulations in place for drugs, in both the EU and US.
If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.
calling the EU a free market that makes problems go away to draft macro economic conclusions from sunscreens is a particularly shallow analysis
Free Market advocates already did that move after walking in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, at times they were more qualified in partisan politics than proficient in Chinese.
We had been hearing their absolute "facts" and only alternative theory for a full century afterwards
I guess it's better to quickly correct that Europe isn't a lawless free market and a huge corpus of regulations still exists, even if the specific problem to approve new sunscreens is a different process in here
regulation and economy can be discussed, but EU isn't an example of free market. Sunscreens are still heavily regulated like everything else. FDA and all their processes aren't perfect, but they do a good job overall
...but then the other flip side is the government does things that result in contamination, dangerous chemicals in food, cookware, people dying, whatever.
You can't be "not convinced" that things would be better - "we" have a free market and that market produced sunscreen in the first place, without which we would have worse health outcomes. There's nothing to imagine - it happened. Things are better for us.
Not all things the free market produced actually have resulted in better health outcomes than if they had been disallowed (many result in the opposite, in fact) and certainly not better economic outcomes for the people who bought and used them. Regulation, as always, is a balancing act between enabling those who would do good and stymieing those (who with the best of intentions or outright sociopathy) would do harm.
So yes I remain unconvinced. Free market maximalists tend to highlight their favorite part of the story while ignoring history.
Regulation has not always resulted in better health outcomes than if the product had otherwise been regulated either. We don't need to set up this false dichotomy between markets and regulation and then bash markets over the head with the negatives aspects while ignoring negatives outcomes as a result of government action which you seem to be insinuating.
So to remain unconvinced doesn't make sense here. Though I guess I can just say I'm unconvinced of government regulations because why not? Same line of reasoning that you're using here.
Sounds like we just agree then. Regulations are necessary and should be tuned, and the Free Market can operate within those regulations, the best of all worlds is where these things work together.
> If the negative effect is this obvious in sunscreen, just imagine how much more impactful removing regulation on cancer drugs would be.
Note that I'm not even explicitly disagreeing with OP, you interpreted my "flipside" as a disagreement. It's undeniable that removing regulations in cancer treatments will be "impactful". Possibly even it will have positive impact. But I am unconvinced that this would be a wise pattern to adopt more broadly.
The original does not read to me as a call for tweaking regulations, it reads like an anti-regulation Boogeyman post. Forgive me for possibly over indexing on patterns I've observed from HNers making this type of comment.
They are of course free at any time to come in and declare that my characterization is unfair, at which my point about the flipside is still completely valid.
Oh, I didn't read it that way at all which is why I interpreted your flip side comment as I did. You seemed to be defending regulation for no good reason in that context where the OP was pointing out how regulation seemed to (and I have done no research on this so I don't know) be holding the United States back, and then pointed out areas where we also have in their opinion regulations that are too strict.
China doesn't have the same strict regulations, and yet when we compare life expectancy the difference isn't particularly big.
Thought terminating cliches like "Better safe than sorry" simply don't stand up to scrutiny once you actually check the numbers.
No, eating brasilian beef isn't going to kill you, and stopping imports from there is going to do a whole lot more to make you poorer than it will help your health. Take a walk, that will help you a whole lot more, and won't make you poorer.
There are so many confounding variables and long-delay influences, it’s nearly impossible to compare.
Prior generation Chinese tended to eat much less than any generation Americans, which has a proven positive effect on longevity.
Older generation Chinese also tended to (might still?) smoke like chimneys, which has a proven negative effect on longevity.
Older generation Chinese also lived through some crazy ‘population bottleneck’ events like the Great Leap Forward, which can cause very odd one time and unpredictable long term effects on longevity.
China started and enforced their one child policy early on, which has very weird population distribution effects, which will also have weird influences on longevity for everyone (due to excess or lacking societal support, etc).
They have also (relatively recently) been exposed to a wide variety of industrial chemicals, artificial fertilizers and pollutants.
Americans have had rapidly shifting food sources, pervasive but changing exposure to pesticides and artificial fertilizers, a massive shift from rural to urban to sedentary knowledge work, and widely shifting stress factors across a wide variety of areas. And a rather unique ability to spend massive amounts of time in commutes and automobiles.
This is also offset in time; and quantitatively different than Chinese have experienced.
Have you forgotten the origins of these laws? Around the turn of the 20th century, it was muckraker journalists that alerted the public to the deceptive and unsafe practices that food and drug companies were using at the time. People didn't know -- that's, eh, how deception works.
Huh? No you can't. Without regulation or oversight, companies will simply lie about what's in their product.
The libertarian vision really handwaves the practical reality of "I'll simply do a gas spectrum analysis on every single bite of food I put into my body. Easy!"
> Take a walk, that will help you a whole lot more, and won't make you poorer.
OK, before the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and Federal Meat Inspection Act, food was frequently adulterated with e.g. formaldehyde in milk, borax in meat, copper salts in canned vegetables, and chalk/plaster in flour or milk.
Before the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, kids candy was dyed with toxic coal-tar. And on top of that was frequently contaminated with arsenic, lead, and mercury.
So please explain to all of us how taking a walk is going to save us from these issues.
More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.
This isn't really the issue, most of the cost of reviewing new drug applications is covered by user fees. And most of the cost and time required for getting a drug approved is in the clinical trials. FDA resources aren't really the bottleneck, the FDA is generally faster than its counterparts in other countries.
>I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.
Yeah, that's called censorship. It's exactly the same thing everyone you accuse of censorship does. There is exactly zero difference beyond your support of the views/people being censored (and sometimes not even that).
>Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
Yes. Yes.
>If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?
Well in my country that line has been drawn. It's just recurring and persistently ignored by the state, the justice system, and private entities.
When a constitution says explicitly "no type or form of censorship is permitted", that's pretty clear what it means. You ignoring it doesn't make that line less clear.
> The goods were still there, still on display and being sold.
This appears to be in dispute.
As per bricks and minifigs:
>It was clear the full list of inventory in his documentation was not located in the store. What items could be reasonably identified as allegedly belonging to the consignor was offered back to the consignor, but that offer was refused.
>A deeper dive into the sales receipts uncovered that a significantly higher volume of the listed sets had sold over the course of the consignment deal prior to the store transition.
It appears they are alleging that the prior operator had sold a larger portion of the consigned goods than they had claimed to the family.
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 simply not one of those things.
publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.
reply