If Alice's household Census data is re-identified, the attacker may learn that she's in a single-sex relationship. Sure, her neighbors may know, but now some o

If Alice's household Census data is re-identified, the attacker may learn that she's in a single-sex relationship. Sure, her neighbors may know, but now some organizations that maybe don't have her best interests at heart are able to easily and automatically locate her and everyone like her, so as to be able to harass them or worse. Or the attacker may learn that Alice is relatively young, has a kid, and doesn't seem to be living with anyone. Sounds like a bastard child, which is a sin. The neighbors are accepting, but now anyone else can find out. Or, maybe Alice is part of a racial or religious minority group that tends to vote Democratic. Now attackers can make a list from afar of individual houses to visit on election day to more efficiently intimidate folks in that group from voting. Or, maybe with a bit of cross-referencing with commercial data, it sure is looking like Alice is not a citizen. This time, the neighbors don't even know, but now the folks who are trying hard to have everyone like her rounded up and expelled ASAP do. Or, maybe a special-interest pedophile group that has a thing for certain age kids in a certain racial group can now make a list of which houses are worth staking out. And, if any of these things happen even on a small scale, and word gets out that it was due to Census data being insufficiently protected, it will mean that in the next census, all these groups of folks will think twice before participating, with the result that they will lose representation at the federal level as well as federal funding for their communities. If this all sounds far-fetched, what do you make of the fact that of the 16 State Attorneys General who sued the Census Bureau over Differential Privacy, 14 were Republicans? With additional briefs from Republican lawmakers from 4 states? (By the way, they lost so resoundingly, and the written rulings by the three-judge panel delivered such a thumping to the attorneys involved, it seems that they slunk away and didn't dare to tarnish themselves any further by taking the next step and appealing to the Supreme Court, where the embarrassment would have been yet worse.)