>The question I kept coming back to in conversations with computer scientists and the Census Bureau was: what would a real-world privacy harm look like? >McShe

>The question I kept coming back to in conversations with computer scientists and the Census Bureau was: what would a real-world privacy harm look like? >McSherry suggested a scenario involving banks or insurance companies using reconstructed data to discriminate on the basis of racial or ethnic categories. ... >But discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity is illegal, That seems glaringly uncritical. It seems awfully close to "Well that couldn't happen because it's illegal!". >But there’s a simple solution to this that even skeptics like Ruggles support: get rid of the smallest blocks. But they're publishing block by block data, you, the user of the data can exclude that data yourself, and the added noise for large blocks is relatively small so you can ignore. So this proposed solution acheives almost nothing. I think we should come back to basics here: the census bureau has 1 job. Generate the data used for the federal government to allocate congressional seats to the states, and allocate spending. It's not really its job to provide data to academics for research. So the priority of "Do your job" vs "Do this other thing that's not really your job" weighs massively in favour of "Do your job". So be grateful for what they release, and realise that something that has the tiniest impact on them being able to do their job completely outweighs your need for them to do something that's not their job.