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> 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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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...
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoI see. You're right, I misunderstood what the attack vector is supposed to be here.
- giaour 5y agoThe census contains some data that commercial databases are legally prohibited from holding (e.g., info about children within a household). The deanonymization/reidentification attacks rely on joining census data against commercial datasets to produce something beyond what either contains. It's not accurate to say this information is already semi-public, because a good deal of it is not.