9 ms·

Privacy concerns are breaking the Census

79 points by bpodgursky 5y ago

fuckcensorship 5y ago
I have similar hesitations about registering to vote in my state (North Carolina) because it makes voter record data available to “Any person upon request and for a fee. Free lists are provided upon request to political parties.” [1]. My name, address, etc. ended up on dozens of sketchy websites after registering to vote previously. Privacy conscious legislation can’t come soon enough. [1]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/access-to-and-use-of-voter-registration-lists.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/access...
- Tostino 5y ago
  Heh if you think that's bad check out FL
- arcbyte 5y ago
  If the government knows it, the same data should be available to all citizens. Traffic camera feeds, voter data, medicare claims, everything. With minor, very narrow restrictions for the very latest military secrets.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    You don't see any practical issues with that approach..? Do you know how much personal information is in a medicare claim?
  - katbyte 5y ago
    I see you’ve never been stalked harassed threatened or dealt with people trying to make your life hell.
    - skeptical2 5y ago
      The government goons are some of the worst stalkers and harassers, which is exactly why they should never be allowed to collect this data in the first place. Our Founders understood this, but unfortunately, humans generally never learn anything from history.
      - mehlmao 5y ago
        The Constitution calls for a census (Enumeration) every ten years. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/Article_1_Section_2.pdf https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/Article_1_Section_2.pdf
        skeptical2 5y ago
- throwaway9980 5y ago
  I feel the same way about donating to political campaigns. It’s just not worth it considering that that information is then public record and could be used against you in all sorts of ways. Perhaps I will feel different when I’m older and of I’ve enough money that I no longer need to worry about damaging my job prospects. Maybe it would make it ok to donate if you also found a likable person on the other side to give money to at the same time.
  - brimble 5y ago
    I'm like this with magazine subscriptions. Seeing my junkmail double after subscribing to one not-cheap literary quarterly was enough to convince me never to subscribe to any sort of periodical again. God knows who else they sold my info to.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    This is a bit of a catch-22. On the one hand, I very much want to know to whom the politicians owe their allegiance to. But, like you, I don't necessarily want the world to know whom I choose to donate to. I believe small, cash-only donations are anonymous. So that might be a good way.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  When I updated my address for voter registration a couple of years ago, I noticed my phone number was wrong so I updated it too. Huge mistake. I rarely received spam texts or telemarketer calls and now I receive both constantly. It started just a couple of months after the change. Even without those two annoyances, the political spam texts are nightmarish. They're basically DDOS attacks because the lists are distributed to large numbers of volunteers using their own phones to send out texts. It doesn't matter how many numbers you block, the next day there are dozens more text from dozens of other numbers. And since they're political campaign texts, they are legal due to the exemption politicians gave themselves to the anti-spam laws. Right now we're in a lull between elections so the number of political texts is small but as we get close to the midterms, it will become an all day affair. In 2020 it peaked at over 80 political texts in a single day. Not sure why they think this is effective in making anyone like them but they keep at it.
  - MerelyMortal 5y ago
    > Not sure why they think this is effective in making anyone like them but they keep at it. It could be the other party trying to make you hate their opponent (a "False Flag" operation).
  - kodah 5y ago
    > Even without those two annoyances, the political spam texts are nightmarish. This was one of the biggest shocks I had moving to California. I eventually got fed up and actually replied telling them never to text me again and someone actually replied. That was when I learned that real people are on the other end of these things. It made it even creepier that my phone number was handed out, not to a machine, but to a real person.
- mateo1 5y ago
  Some data have to be public for them to be audited by multiple independent parties. It is absolutely necessary for democracy to function. I don't see what harm can be done by someone knowing your name and address.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ayyninymous223 5y ago
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    spoken like a person with a common name and/or no mortal enemies
teddyh 5y ago
I would certainly rather they erred on the side of privacy. If the data cannot be released without compromising privacy, I would rather it not be released at all.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  The point is that there is no meaningful gain in privacy, and it comes at the cost of crippling important research.
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      I mean, if you don't like the research, it also directly directly impacts voting representation and where federal grant money is distributed, to target the intended demographics and population. Basing either of those on random noise is very very bad.
    - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
      Do you think infrastructure planning is important?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Definition of privacy derangement syndrome, right there. This is superficial "privacy" which affords no marginal improvement in your actual privacy but does concretely break the Census.
  - bigyellow 5y ago
    Where is that definition from? I couldn't find it in DSM-5. Also, why is the Census (or any collective action) more important than an individual's subjective view of privacy (or any private thought)?
mindslight 5y ago
First, the article would read much better without a pejorative outgroup reference of "weirdo living off the grid", especially in its opening paragraph! In general we would have to be much less guarded about the collection of personal information if we had laws prohibiting its harmful use ala the GDPR. Presently, anything that is collected becomes fair game for the advertising-surveillance industry's monetization, manipulation, and indefinite storage. So an entity with a bona fide use for personal information (eg The Census) cannot be trusted because resisting collection of such data is currently the only way to prevent yourself from being abused. And while I agree practically the Census isn't really collecting much data that the surveillance industry doesn't already have, this dynamic still informs societal norms.
fitblipper 5y ago
I hate the argument this blog uses. Just because your data is available and abused through websites A, B, and C doesn't mean you should add your private data to site D. If I'm trying to avoid catching Covid-19 by limiting exposure but have to go the the grocery story, the doctors, and the gas station it doesn't mean I should also go to a music concert since I'm already unable to avoid exposure.
- 8note 5y ago
  i dont think thats a comparable case. the avaiable and abusd would mean you caught and recovered from covid via the grocery store, and youre avoiding future exposure from the music concert while already immune
  - omg_ponies 5y ago
    It's a nearly perfect comparison IMO. Risk is cumulative, and the number of risk-inducing events affects the outcome. Your response incorrectly assumes that the risk has already been realised.
ineedasername 5y ago
Wow, if privacy is the concern then it makes a heck of a lot more sense not to publish fine grained data. Keep it at the tract level instead of block since those are more closely defined by the population size living in them-- usually a few thousand. Giving purposely bad data is much worse than no data.
gruez 5y ago
>Private companies are already scrutinizing your purchase patterns to determine that you are pregnant and then potentially getting in hot water for notifying relatives you haven’t actually informed. >Given that baseline reality, compromising the usefulness of Census data for the sake of minimal privacy gains seems really bad. The difference is that you can opt out of various companies collecting data. Can you opt out of the census? With this sort of argument, you can basically justify any sort of government privacy intrusion because private companies are already doing it, so "compromising the usefulness of NSA surveillance data for the sake of minimal privacy gains seems really bad". You do want to stop terrorists and pedophiles, don't you?
- viscountchocula 5y ago
  I think you're significantly overestimating the practical ability to opt out of commercial collection. Governmental and commercial collection seem equally non-opt-outable to me.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >The difference is that you can opt out of various companies collecting data. Can you opt out of the census? I'm going to assume that this isn't a rhetorical question. Yes. Just don't fill out the form. And if the Census folks send folks to your house, you can pretend not to be home, politely ask them to leave, or in states that allow it, shoot such trespassers dead. In fact, I'd prefer it if those who live in areas that consistently elect folks from $PARTY whose platform is more disagreeable to me do exactly that. That way, when congressional districts are redrawn, the $PARTY that annoys me more will have a harder time getting elected. Redistricting is, after all, the primary purpose of the Census. Edit: Less is more.
  - giaour 5y ago
    Technically, failure to respond to the census is punishable by a fine of $100, but this is rarely (if ever) enforced. After a certain number of tries without getting a response, census takers are supposed to impute how you would have responded and use that.
  - 5y ago
kodah 5y ago
> unless you are a weirdo living off the grid, basic Census-style information about where you live, your age, marital status, and race and gender identities is widely available to commercial actors. Being able to doxx with PII was shown to be able to be done in the suburbs, so this is more accurately phrased as "anyone in low-density suburbs and below are at-risk." If the author doesn't care about that, then just say it. There's many deanonymization attacks, and this is just one, but it showcases just how little is required with an actual dataset: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf The authors basic argument can be summarized as, "Well, companies already list all your personal data, or just flat out abuse it. So, let the government also list your personal data so we can make congressional seats as accurate as possible." Congressional seats being affected by census data scrubbing is not good, it should be fixed, but open data to the public that can be enumerated and deanonymized isn't a good thing either. If the census can't be anonymized, or is rolled back then I imagine we'll have to start warning people about participating in the census. The irony at that point is your census data also won't be accurate because of a lack of participation.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  The author doesn't care about that and says it pretty clearly. He doesn't (and I don't) think that it makes sense to think in terms of "deanonymization attacks" here, since your legal name, address, and basic demographic information are already semi-publicly linked together in a large variety of ways. Is it deanonymization if I go to the county registrar and pull the deed for someone's house?
  - kodah 5y ago
    I fixed the link, sorry about that. You can deanonymize block level data and the study shows as much. You just need to have some amount of information that is either unique or low enough in distribution. There's a tutorial on Twitter if you'd like to follow: https://mobile.twitter.com/john_abowd/status/1114942180278272000 https://mobile.twitter.com/john_abowd/status/111494218027827...
cpwright 5y ago
If the census simply enumerated the population, then I don't think there are the same level of concerns. The data they are collecting related to demographics is beyond what is necessary for congressional apportionment. If they collected only the required data; then there would not be a need to fuzz it.
throwaway058527 5y ago
Our family of 5 lives in a certain state where politics are very one-sided. The Census tried to move heaven and earth to contact us. We avoided them like the plague. Imagine my surprise when i heard that our state had lost a house seat, due to being 80 people short of the required population count to keep its prior state house seat apportionment. By avoiding the Census, we were able to change the machine of bureacuracy far better than by regular voting. Sometimes the winning move, is really not to play.
HedgingPointer 5y ago
It seems as thought this author has never read any materials on inference control... Ross Anderson's Security Engineering Chapter 9 is all about this https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf (Anderson releases the textbook free online) This is a fairly well developed field (i.e., in medicine there highly screened "Medical Statisticians" who give data to research groups only after it's properly anonymized. They know beforehand what the researchers are interested in, and introduce noise that effects all the measures _except_ the ones the researchers said they were interested in looking at beforehand. > The idea behind the differential privacy strategy, as I understand it, is that you can basically introduce statistical noise into the block-level results in a way that will make it impossible to reverse-engineer the demographic profile of people who live at specific addresses. >This has, I think, roughly zero real-world privacy value This was painful to read...
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  There is an enormous practical difference between allowing inference of medical conditions (PHI deidentification) and allowing in edge cases the inference of information that is already available in public voter registration rolls.
  - giaour 5y ago
    > allowing in edge cases the inference of information that is already available in public voter registration rolls. This is a really inaccurate way to characterize what researchers were able to obtain from reidentification attacks on block-level data from the 2010 census: https://www.science.org/content/article/can-set-equations-keep-us-census-data-private https://www.science.org/content/article/can-set-equations-ke...
- droidist2 5y ago
  > They know beforehand what the researchers are interested in, and introduce noise that effects all the measures _except_ the ones the researchers said they were interested in looking at beforehand. Isn't there a danger in the census statisticians doing the same thing? That they'll introduce noise that affects looking at the data in ways that they didn't anticipate or allow for. Or even that hinders drawing conclusions that go against current dogma.
tharne 5y ago
The Census has really lost the thread. The original mission was simply to do a headcount to determine how many representatives and electoral votes each state was entitled to. One thing that annoyed me in particular was their creepy obsession around race. Even once you answer, "White", there are several more questions aimed at determining precisely what subcategory of white person you are. If anyone at the census is listening, here's some advice. If you only get to ask Americans a handful of question once every ten years, don't waste half of them trying to figure out someone's 50 shades of whiteness.
- ironman1478 5y ago
  This is important for understanding how gerrymandered a district is.
  - tharne 5y ago
    > This is important for understanding how gerrymandered a district is. That's a bit circular. One of the main reasons that districts are so easy to gerrymander is precisely because there is so much rich census data that can be used to predict voting patterns.
    - ironman1478 5y ago
      Its probably possible to gerrymander a state without this information? Sure, it would be harder (and probably less effective) but you could use proxy metrics to figure out the distribution of race within a state. I imagine I could use housing data as a proxy for example, given that property values are correlated with race. I don't have exact proof of that last statement, but it feels right. Also, I did some reading. Apparently the census has been asking these questions since 1790 https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/race/ https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio.... Though, I imagine the nature of the question has changed over time.
    - brimble 5y ago
      Parties and campaigns already buy & maintain huge private databases on this stuff. They wouldn't hesitate to buy slightly more to have that info, because gerrymandering is so powerful. Watchdogs and groups trying to fight gerrymandering (racially-tilted or otherwise) usually don't have as many resources. It's harder for the public to keep an eye on this without public data, while keeping it private-only barely inconveniences the most relevant bad actors.
jefftk 5y ago
The language of "do not disclose the information reported by, or on behalf of, any particular respondent" really does look to me like it requires Differential Privacy. Otherwise the different aggregations will reveal information for some participants. It's unfortunate that this means the Census isn't accurately presenting information needed for fair representation, but I don't think this is something that can be fixed by attempting to shame the Census for putting out "inaccurate information"?
giaour 5y ago
This was an extremely lazy article. It doesn't seem like Yglesias made any effort to engage with the Census's rationale for using differential privacy, with the Bureau's historic methods for privacy preservation (e.g., "swapping," a different way to deliberately introduce errors that has been in use in Census data products for decades), or with what might have changed since 2010 that might justify a new approach to privacy. Even though congress hasn't updated Title 13 in the past decade, there have been significant advances in statistical methodology that reduced or eliminated the effectiveness of the Bureau's previous methods of privacy preservation.
parkingrift 5y ago
Can someone explain to me why we need the census at all? Why are we actively pretending that the federal government doesn't have precise estimates for where people live?
- spicyusername 5y ago
  > have precise estimates for where people live? The census is how they have that estimate...
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    Do you really, seriously, believe that the intelligence agencies in the United States use the census for their population estimates?
- brimble 5y ago
  The way we live in a complete surveillance state except when it would in any way provide convenience, at which point we have to pretend we don't, is something I find irritating on a pretty regular basis.
- pueblito 5y ago
  It’s a constitutional requirement, Article 1 section 2
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    That section just explains that the count should be updated every ten years, among other things. It doesn't say we need some useless government organization to spend billions of dollars to tell the federal government what they already know. We just simply need to update the count of free persons. That's it.
phkahler 5y ago
Its gerrymandering level 2.
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
We had obligatory census in Poland. Truth be told, seeing the state of our governement, I fully expect all of it to leak out sooner or later. :|
uoaei 5y ago
Title should be "Census is broken because it does not handle privacy concerns" Yglesias once again looking at the right thing and getting exactly the wrong conclusion out of it.
aaron695 5y ago

79 points by bpodgursky 5y ago

I have similar hesitations about registering to vote in my state (North Carolina) because it makes voter record data available to “Any person upon request and for a fee. Free lists are provided upon request to political parties.” [1]. My name, address, etc. ended up on dozens of sketchy websites after registering to vote previously. Privacy conscious legislation can’t come soon enough. [1]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/access-to-and-use-of-voter-registration-lists.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/access...

Tostino 5y ago
Heh if you think that's bad check out FL
arcbyte 5y ago
If the government knows it, the same data should be available to all citizens. Traffic camera feeds, voter data, medicare claims, everything. With minor, very narrow restrictions for the very latest military secrets.
- thebean11 5y ago
  You don't see any practical issues with that approach..? Do you know how much personal information is in a medicare claim?
- katbyte 5y ago
  I see you’ve never been stalked harassed threatened or dealt with people trying to make your life hell.
  - skeptical2 5y ago
    The government goons are some of the worst stalkers and harassers, which is exactly why they should never be allowed to collect this data in the first place. Our Founders understood this, but unfortunately, humans generally never learn anything from history.
    - mehlmao 5y ago
      The Constitution calls for a census (Enumeration) every ten years. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/Article_1_Section_2.pdf https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/Article_1_Section_2.pdf
      - skeptical2 5y ago
throwaway9980 5y ago
I feel the same way about donating to political campaigns. It’s just not worth it considering that that information is then public record and could be used against you in all sorts of ways. Perhaps I will feel different when I’m older and of I’ve enough money that I no longer need to worry about damaging my job prospects. Maybe it would make it ok to donate if you also found a likable person on the other side to give money to at the same time.
- brimble 5y ago
  I'm like this with magazine subscriptions. Seeing my junkmail double after subscribing to one not-cheap literary quarterly was enough to convince me never to subscribe to any sort of periodical again. God knows who else they sold my info to.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  This is a bit of a catch-22. On the one hand, I very much want to know to whom the politicians owe their allegiance to. But, like you, I don't necessarily want the world to know whom I choose to donate to. I believe small, cash-only donations are anonymous. So that might be a good way.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
When I updated my address for voter registration a couple of years ago, I noticed my phone number was wrong so I updated it too. Huge mistake. I rarely received spam texts or telemarketer calls and now I receive both constantly. It started just a couple of months after the change. Even without those two annoyances, the political spam texts are nightmarish. They're basically DDOS attacks because the lists are distributed to large numbers of volunteers using their own phones to send out texts. It doesn't matter how many numbers you block, the next day there are dozens more text from dozens of other numbers. And since they're political campaign texts, they are legal due to the exemption politicians gave themselves to the anti-spam laws. Right now we're in a lull between elections so the number of political texts is small but as we get close to the midterms, it will become an all day affair. In 2020 it peaked at over 80 political texts in a single day. Not sure why they think this is effective in making anyone like them but they keep at it.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  > Not sure why they think this is effective in making anyone like them but they keep at it. It could be the other party trying to make you hate their opponent (a "False Flag" operation).
- kodah 5y ago
  > Even without those two annoyances, the political spam texts are nightmarish. This was one of the biggest shocks I had moving to California. I eventually got fed up and actually replied telling them never to text me again and someone actually replied. That was when I learned that real people are on the other end of these things. It made it even creepier that my phone number was handed out, not to a machine, but to a real person.
mateo1 5y ago
Some data have to be public for them to be audited by multiple independent parties. It is absolutely necessary for democracy to function. I don't see what harm can be done by someone knowing your name and address.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ayyninymous223 5y ago
- bagacrap 5y ago
  spoken like a person with a common name and/or no mortal enemies

teddyh 5y ago

I would certainly rather they erred on the side of privacy. If the data cannot be released without compromising privacy, I would rather it not be released at all.

bpodgursky 5y ago
The point is that there is no meaningful gain in privacy, and it comes at the cost of crippling important research.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    I mean, if you don't like the research, it also directly directly impacts voting representation and where federal grant money is distributed, to target the intended demographics and population. Basing either of those on random noise is very very bad.
  - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    Do you think infrastructure planning is important?
jeffbee 5y ago
Definition of privacy derangement syndrome, right there. This is superficial "privacy" which affords no marginal improvement in your actual privacy but does concretely break the Census.
- bigyellow 5y ago
  Where is that definition from? I couldn't find it in DSM-5. Also, why is the Census (or any collective action) more important than an individual's subjective view of privacy (or any private thought)?

mindslight 5y ago

First, the article would read much better without a pejorative outgroup reference of "weirdo living off the grid", especially in its opening paragraph! In general we would have to be much less guarded about the collection of personal information if we had laws prohibiting its harmful use ala the GDPR. Presently, anything that is collected becomes fair game for the advertising-surveillance industry's monetization, manipulation, and indefinite storage. So an entity with a bona fide use for personal information (eg The Census) cannot be trusted because resisting collection of such data is currently the only way to prevent yourself from being abused. And while I agree practically the Census isn't really collecting much data that the surveillance industry doesn't already have, this dynamic still informs societal norms.

fitblipper 5y ago

I hate the argument this blog uses. Just because your data is available and abused through websites A, B, and C doesn't mean you should add your private data to site D. If I'm trying to avoid catching Covid-19 by limiting exposure but have to go the the grocery story, the doctors, and the gas station it doesn't mean I should also go to a music concert since I'm already unable to avoid exposure.

8note 5y ago
i dont think thats a comparable case. the avaiable and abusd would mean you caught and recovered from covid via the grocery store, and youre avoiding future exposure from the music concert while already immune
- omg_ponies 5y ago
  It's a nearly perfect comparison IMO. Risk is cumulative, and the number of risk-inducing events affects the outcome. Your response incorrectly assumes that the risk has already been realised.

ineedasername 5y ago

Wow, if privacy is the concern then it makes a heck of a lot more sense not to publish fine grained data. Keep it at the tract level instead of block since those are more closely defined by the population size living in them-- usually a few thousand. Giving purposely bad data is much worse than no data.

gruez 5y ago

>Private companies are already scrutinizing your purchase patterns to determine that you are pregnant and then potentially getting in hot water for notifying relatives you haven’t actually informed. >Given that baseline reality, compromising the usefulness of Census data for the sake of minimal privacy gains seems really bad. The difference is that you can opt out of various companies collecting data. Can you opt out of the census? With this sort of argument, you can basically justify any sort of government privacy intrusion because private companies are already doing it, so "compromising the usefulness of NSA surveillance data for the sake of minimal privacy gains seems really bad". You do want to stop terrorists and pedophiles, don't you?

viscountchocula 5y ago
I think you're significantly overestimating the practical ability to opt out of commercial collection. Governmental and commercial collection seem equally non-opt-outable to me.
nobody9999 5y ago
>The difference is that you can opt out of various companies collecting data. Can you opt out of the census? I'm going to assume that this isn't a rhetorical question. Yes. Just don't fill out the form. And if the Census folks send folks to your house, you can pretend not to be home, politely ask them to leave, or in states that allow it, shoot such trespassers dead. In fact, I'd prefer it if those who live in areas that consistently elect folks from $PARTY whose platform is more disagreeable to me do exactly that. That way, when congressional districts are redrawn, the $PARTY that annoys me more will have a harder time getting elected. Redistricting is, after all, the primary purpose of the Census. Edit: Less is more.
- giaour 5y ago
  Technically, failure to respond to the census is punishable by a fine of $100, but this is rarely (if ever) enforced. After a certain number of tries without getting a response, census takers are supposed to impute how you would have responded and use that.
- 5y ago

kodah 5y ago

> unless you are a weirdo living off the grid, basic Census-style information about where you live, your age, marital status, and race and gender identities is widely available to commercial actors. Being able to doxx with PII was shown to be able to be done in the suburbs, so this is more accurately phrased as "anyone in low-density suburbs and below are at-risk." If the author doesn't care about that, then just say it. There's many deanonymization attacks, and this is just one, but it showcases just how little is required with an actual dataset: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf The authors basic argument can be summarized as, "Well, companies already list all your personal data, or just flat out abuse it. So, let the government also list your personal data so we can make congressional seats as accurate as possible." Congressional seats being affected by census data scrubbing is not good, it should be fixed, but open data to the public that can be enumerated and deanonymized isn't a good thing either. If the census can't be anonymized, or is rolled back then I imagine we'll have to start warning people about participating in the census. The irony at that point is your census data also won't be accurate because of a lack of participation.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
The author doesn't care about that and says it pretty clearly. He doesn't (and I don't) think that it makes sense to think in terms of "deanonymization attacks" here, since your legal name, address, and basic demographic information are already semi-publicly linked together in a large variety of ways. Is it deanonymization if I go to the county registrar and pull the deed for someone's house?
- kodah 5y ago
  I fixed the link, sorry about that. You can deanonymize block level data and the study shows as much. You just need to have some amount of information that is either unique or low enough in distribution. There's a tutorial on Twitter if you'd like to follow: https://mobile.twitter.com/john_abowd/status/1114942180278272000 https://mobile.twitter.com/john_abowd/status/111494218027827...

cpwright 5y ago

If the census simply enumerated the population, then I don't think there are the same level of concerns. The data they are collecting related to demographics is beyond what is necessary for congressional apportionment. If they collected only the required data; then there would not be a need to fuzz it.

throwaway058527 5y ago

Our family of 5 lives in a certain state where politics are very one-sided. The Census tried to move heaven and earth to contact us. We avoided them like the plague. Imagine my surprise when i heard that our state had lost a house seat, due to being 80 people short of the required population count to keep its prior state house seat apportionment. By avoiding the Census, we were able to change the machine of bureacuracy far better than by regular voting. Sometimes the winning move, is really not to play.

HedgingPointer 5y ago

It seems as thought this author has never read any materials on inference control... Ross Anderson's Security Engineering Chapter 9 is all about this https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf (Anderson releases the textbook free online) This is a fairly well developed field (i.e., in medicine there highly screened "Medical Statisticians" who give data to research groups only after it's properly anonymized. They know beforehand what the researchers are interested in, and introduce noise that effects all the measures _except_ the ones the researchers said they were interested in looking at beforehand. > The idea behind the differential privacy strategy, as I understand it, is that you can basically introduce statistical noise into the block-level results in a way that will make it impossible to reverse-engineer the demographic profile of people who live at specific addresses. >This has, I think, roughly zero real-world privacy value This was painful to read...

bpodgursky 5y ago
There is an enormous practical difference between allowing inference of medical conditions (PHI deidentification) and allowing in edge cases the inference of information that is already available in public voter registration rolls.
- giaour 5y ago
  > allowing in edge cases the inference of information that is already available in public voter registration rolls. This is a really inaccurate way to characterize what researchers were able to obtain from reidentification attacks on block-level data from the 2010 census: https://www.science.org/content/article/can-set-equations-keep-us-census-data-private https://www.science.org/content/article/can-set-equations-ke...
droidist2 5y ago
> They know beforehand what the researchers are interested in, and introduce noise that effects all the measures _except_ the ones the researchers said they were interested in looking at beforehand. Isn't there a danger in the census statisticians doing the same thing? That they'll introduce noise that affects looking at the data in ways that they didn't anticipate or allow for. Or even that hinders drawing conclusions that go against current dogma.

tharne 5y ago

The Census has really lost the thread. The original mission was simply to do a headcount to determine how many representatives and electoral votes each state was entitled to. One thing that annoyed me in particular was their creepy obsession around race. Even once you answer, "White", there are several more questions aimed at determining precisely what subcategory of white person you are. If anyone at the census is listening, here's some advice. If you only get to ask Americans a handful of question once every ten years, don't waste half of them trying to figure out someone's 50 shades of whiteness.

ironman1478 5y ago
This is important for understanding how gerrymandered a district is.
- tharne 5y ago
  > This is important for understanding how gerrymandered a district is. That's a bit circular. One of the main reasons that districts are so easy to gerrymander is precisely because there is so much rich census data that can be used to predict voting patterns.
  - ironman1478 5y ago
    Its probably possible to gerrymander a state without this information? Sure, it would be harder (and probably less effective) but you could use proxy metrics to figure out the distribution of race within a state. I imagine I could use housing data as a proxy for example, given that property values are correlated with race. I don't have exact proof of that last statement, but it feels right. Also, I did some reading. Apparently the census has been asking these questions since 1790 https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/race/ https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio.... Though, I imagine the nature of the question has changed over time.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Parties and campaigns already buy & maintain huge private databases on this stuff. They wouldn't hesitate to buy slightly more to have that info, because gerrymandering is so powerful. Watchdogs and groups trying to fight gerrymandering (racially-tilted or otherwise) usually don't have as many resources. It's harder for the public to keep an eye on this without public data, while keeping it private-only barely inconveniences the most relevant bad actors.

jefftk 5y ago

The language of "do not disclose the information reported by, or on behalf of, any particular respondent" really does look to me like it requires Differential Privacy. Otherwise the different aggregations will reveal information for some participants. It's unfortunate that this means the Census isn't accurately presenting information needed for fair representation, but I don't think this is something that can be fixed by attempting to shame the Census for putting out "inaccurate information"?

giaour 5y ago

This was an extremely lazy article. It doesn't seem like Yglesias made any effort to engage with the Census's rationale for using differential privacy, with the Bureau's historic methods for privacy preservation (e.g., "swapping," a different way to deliberately introduce errors that has been in use in Census data products for decades), or with what might have changed since 2010 that might justify a new approach to privacy. Even though congress hasn't updated Title 13 in the past decade, there have been significant advances in statistical methodology that reduced or eliminated the effectiveness of the Bureau's previous methods of privacy preservation.

parkingrift 5y ago

Can someone explain to me why we need the census at all? Why are we actively pretending that the federal government doesn't have precise estimates for where people live?

spicyusername 5y ago
> have precise estimates for where people live? The census is how they have that estimate...
- parkingrift 5y ago
  Do you really, seriously, believe that the intelligence agencies in the United States use the census for their population estimates?
brimble 5y ago
The way we live in a complete surveillance state except when it would in any way provide convenience, at which point we have to pretend we don't, is something I find irritating on a pretty regular basis.
pueblito 5y ago
It’s a constitutional requirement, Article 1 section 2
- parkingrift 5y ago
  That section just explains that the count should be updated every ten years, among other things. It doesn't say we need some useless government organization to spend billions of dollars to tell the federal government what they already know. We just simply need to update the count of free persons. That's it.

phkahler 5y ago

Its gerrymandering level 2.

Claude_Shannon 5y ago

We had obligatory census in Poland. Truth be told, seeing the state of our governement, I fully expect all of it to leak out sooner or later. :|

uoaei 5y ago

Title should be "Census is broken because it does not handle privacy concerns" Yglesias once again looking at the right thing and getting exactly the wrong conclusion out of it.

aaron695 5y ago