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

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.