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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
- fauria 4mo ago[flagged]
- whatever1 4mo agoWe can make them more accurate by leveraging ICE going door to door.
- Pragmata 4mo agoFrankly i see no reason to keep this data private. They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc... Fundamentally this is public data. If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is. There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is simply not one of those things. publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.
- simonw 4mo agoHow hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible. Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.
- mobeets 4mo agoThank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting
- jonhohle 4mo agoThis seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.
- simonw 4mo agoI don't think the question "Has this person given birth to any children in the past 12 months?" would look good on a tax return.
- brainwad 4mo agoMy home country pays a baby bonus to people and it's administered via the tax system, so I think we ask something very similar actually.
- bpt3 4mo agoHave you filled out a federal income tax return in the US? It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).
- arbot360 4mo agoIsn't that already on the tax return? Your dependent count would increment from the prior year. The IRS can also distinguish births vs adoptions and step children by the checking for novel SSNs.
- happyopossum 4mo ago> tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level. Plenty of people don’t file tax returns (legally even, there’s a minimum income threshold).
- halJordan 4mo agoThat's a good default position, and I think should be our starting point. But the devil is in the details. If we don't want advertisers constructing semi-complete profiles from simple web interactions then why would we publish 330 million census questionnaires for their use?
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo ago[flagged]
- SoftTalker 4mo agoBut why is the census asking about those attrbutes at all. The Constitution requires a count. That's it. A number. We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.
- righthand 4mo agoThe census is already voluntary LOL. So we’d have two censuses?
- bpt3 4mo ago[flagged]
- righthand 4mo ago[flagged]
- greyface- 4mo agoCensus participation is not voluntary. Failure to provide complete or accurate data is, in theory, punishable by a fine. Last census, I intentionally provided incomplete data on the web form, which resulted in a person with a clipboard and some stern questions showing up at my door.
- righthand 4mo agoTo counter this, I had a census taker show up at my door and ask me if they knew how many people lived in the neighboring apartment. Where was the consequence there?
- 4mo ago
- toast0 4mo ago> They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc... They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 4mo ago1. People give the information to the government under the expectation that this data is to be kept private or used in such a way that individual targeting is made impossible, you break that expectation and people will lie or won't give you this data. 2. Without noise injection it's rather simple to do statistical attacks to reverse engineer individual entities. 3. This data is and has already been used in the past to undermine democratic systems by targeting and disenfranchising minorities, as well as gerrymandering the US to hell. 4. "Too dangerous to make public, too dangerous to collect" - this is a false dichotomy. To govern effectively you need sensitive data, but it should be collected and used in a way that's safe for the individuals. 5. Macro level aggregates don't need individual exposure, that's why noise, anonymization and statistical functions are fine.
- lokar 4mo agoRe point 1, not just an expectation, and explicit legal requirement.
- righthand 4mo agoThen dox yourself right now with your previous census answers and PII. There are several obvious reasons to keep the data private, all you have to do is use your brain.
- anonymars 4mo agoI've never met a "privacy is irrelevant" advocate that doesn't close the door when they go to the toilet
- fwipsy 4mo agoSo do you believe that individual income should be public? Or do you believe that the government should not take income into account for taxation or distribution of benefits?
- bombcar 4mo agosome countries do make income available publicly. even the USA does it for public employees in many states.
- vharuck 4mo ago>If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is. While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public. This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed. Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.
- abletonlive 4mo agoThere will be a bunch of people that start off with the premise that this data should be private and make following arguments based on this premise. So I'll just go ahead and ask, give me good reasons why this data should be private? My guess is that most of you think we should be counting illegals because they should have representation. And I reject that
- simonw 4mo agoHow about we should be "counting illegals" so that we know how many of them there are? (Do you reject that? As someone who uses the phrase "counting illegals" I imagine you would be interested in knowing what that number is.)
- abletonlive 4mo agoFirst off the census is used for determining how many seats are used for congressional apportionment and allocating federal funds. So unless you're willing to also say that counted illegals cannot used for either of those, then you're just being obtuse. But if we can agree that they cannot be used for that then sure, lets identify and count them. If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?
- knollimar 4mo ago"If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?" You're trading a chance of accuracy (good faith handling of data) for a guarantee of non-accuracy
- latency-guy2 4mo agoCounting illegals on a poorly defined framework of which is largely self attestation?
- latency-guy2 4mo agoWe also know that this premise is simply wrong, Census is statistical survey, no party in the world is legally allowed to inspect the contents of the individual form via Title 13. Counting illegals is not possible under the Census currently or in any point in the future most likely https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/13/9 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/13/9 https://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born/about/faq.html https://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born/about/...
- delichon 4mo agoThe dueling political demands of accuracy and privacy are simply incompatible at some level. After reading this, maybe Hanlon's Razor isn't the right standard. Besides malice and stupidity, there is impossibility. Some problems just aren't solvable under certain constraints. I don't envy the statisticians tasked with finding a politically palatable solution to a math problem.
- ghaff 4mo agoThere's a ton of information in the US that is accessible to various degrees--especially through the the deep web much less background investigations. Unless you're a wealthy person who can set up various levels of trusts you can't really hide them. You can of course disagree about what what should actually be part of a transparent public record. (Though I suspect a lot of people post-date what was generally available in a "phone book.")
- Sol- 4mo agoBut the strength of differential privacy is that you can now make this tradeoff explicit and quantify it. I always liked it because it offers a mathematical solution to a policy problem, but then of course it's up to us to decide what parameters and tradeoff to choose. Also, some data might just not get published at all if the privacy implications are too problematic, so differential privacy might buy you more signal!
- tbrownaw 4mo agoIt offers a mathematical description of a policy tradeoff, and the policy makers are apparently setting one of the parameters to zero.
- thatfrenchguy 4mo agoYeah, the main issue with differential privacy is that you need competent government officials making decisions who understand math beyond a high school level.
- xenophonf 4mo agoThis is a gift to reactionary gerrymandering and voting restriction efforts, along with things like yesterday's FBI raid of an Ohio voting rights organization. https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohio-voting-rights-group-says-it-was-raided-by-the-fbi https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohi... Representative Joyce Beatty is from Ohio and was instrumental in stopping Trump from illegally renaming the Kennedy Center. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-beatty/687451/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-b...
- thepryz 4mo agoRepresentative Beatty serves her own interests and her involvement Kennedy Center naming was just more of the same performative politics she routinely engages in. She's on the verge of being an octogenarian and missed a number of key votes, like the bill that cut funding to NPR, PBS, and other govt. programs. Kudos to her for working to remove Trump's name from the Kennedy Center but she needs to go.
- smrtinsert 4mo agoThe removal of his name is not performative since we're in the thick of a cult of personality president (at a bare minimum).
- tbrownaw 4mo ago> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. Maybe banning it is a way of pretending that the problem doesn't exist, in the hope that it will go away? Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.
- asolove 4mo agoThe replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way. It’s a census: it just asks questions. If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.
- derektank 4mo agoThe entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.
- notfromhere 4mo agoCongress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that. You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.
- r14c 4mo agoIsn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.
- Supermancho 4mo ago> I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt There's a question of what you mean. Is it, can they be corrupt? have they been corrupt? are they currently corrupt (because of the previous, or incidentally)? Plato thought Democracy was corrupt and it's the least inherently corrupt system I know of. I would say they are fundamentally corrupt. The best you can do is try to limit it with a document (like the US Constitution) and setting up a multi-branch power structure capable of adversarial action. As you point out, the US does not have that and it's showing.
- jmole 4mo agoBan it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise. I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined". Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.
- glitchc 4mo ago> Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise. It is introduced in the public data, not the secret data.
- thomasahle 4mo ago> Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise. Not sure exactly what you're proposing, but if the noise is added independently to different people, you can just buy multiple copies to reduce it. There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why so much analysis has gone into differential privacy.
- jmole 4mo agoSorry, I think you're reading more into this than I intended to say. My point was that the raw data itself doesn't need noise, but the published data necessarily does.
- wnc3141 4mo agoStalin's demographic researchers kept disappearing until they came up with the numbers he wanted.
- watersb 4mo agoThe better to sell the data, all your privates are belong to us.
- MinimalAction 4mo agoWhatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment. Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.
- mschuster91 4mo ago> But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment. That frankly sounds more like a failure of enforcement, on top of a failure of the construction of the financial system. Here in Germany, it is absolutely not a common thing that mortgages or the banks holding them get sold like a hot potato towards some other sucker, and thus such a letter would cause immediate suspicion.
- wongarsu 4mo agoHere in Germany, founding a company creates a public record. There are a number of companies who then send all newly formed companies an invoice that looks like a legitimate invoice for expenses related to creating said company, but on closer inspection actually contain a dense paragraph of text that details that this is not an invoice at all, merely an offer you accept by paying. Quite possibly even a subscription It's a well-known trick, our notary warned us that these letters would come and we should scrutinize any invoice for a while. But they manage to skirt at the edge of legality
- TomatoCo 4mo agoIn the USA you'll get buttloads of mail urging you to do things such as confirm your home warranty at risk of not being covered. With addresses that says "RE: (your mortgage provider)" to make it look like it's from them.
- Kim_Bruning 4mo agoComing from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble. "What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .
- Rygian 4mo ago"What is your religious affiliation" makes absolutely no sense in a census exercise. IMO.
- yoyohello13 4mo agoUnless you’re a government explicitly and openly aligned with Christian nationalists.
- twoodfin 4mo agoThe U.S. Census Bureau collects tons of data unrelated to the decennial counting for Congressional apportionment. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys.html https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys.html The American Community Survey is the most well-known, as it replaced the “long form” sampling that had been an extension to the Census.
- mschuster91 4mo agoIt actually does. Religious affinity can absolutely be useful for longer trend studies, and census data is usually of much, much higher quality than other random sample studies.
- Rygian 4mo agoWith that perspective, how do you prevent scope creep when preparing a census exercise? You would collect everything and the shape of each house's kitchen sink, because "it can be useful".
- 4mo ago
- lokar 4mo agoCan anyone share how other countries handle this?
- simonw 4mo agoA lot of countries are really bad at running their census. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-governments-cant-count https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-governments-cant-count
- ghaff 4mo agoAnd a lot of countries have things like national IDs that, rightly or wrongly, given things like RealID and passports, that a lot of Americans just don't like on principle.
- pelorat 4mo agoSure, in Europe we don't because we already have databases of all citizens, also recording attributes like race, skin color, religious affiliation or political leaning in a database is highly illegal, both for the government and for private use.
- throw-the-towel 4mo agoWait, are you saying Europe doesn't have censuses?
- generj 4mo agoMany countries effectively have a live registry of where people live, updated to within a few weeks. A door to door census isn’t needed because they can do something like: SELECT a.province, COUNT(DISTINCT b.id_num) FROM registry a INNER JOIN national_id b ON a.nat_id_num = b.id_num WHERE timeframe = 2026-01-01 GROUP BY 1
- gpvos 4mo agoCorrect. At least, not that I know of. On the other hand, when you move, you must deregister with your old municipality and register with your new one. The exact system differs a bit per country.
- foolfoolz 4mo agoi have such a hard time reconciling stuff like this: > The census bureau decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census and: > The consequences will be dire for utility or for privacy, and possibly both. It's hard to understate this point: future statistical releases will either be useless compared to past ones, or they will be incredibly unsafe so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.” and for the last census only we added some privacy items. but if we remove just one of those filters, we are in “dire” circumstances? but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this. this makes it feel like an emotional overblown problem
- LPisGood 4mo agoThe concerns here, like most concerns about privacy, are hyperbolic hypothetical hypochondria, until they’re not.
- vlovich123 4mo agoBelieve it or not, mathematical techniques and computational power have increased in the past hundreds of years, not to mention the digitization of everything. Privacy issues that weren’t possible before due to cost are now pennies to exploit. Also keep in mind as it points out people were using census data to drive gerrymandering efforts, so these attacks are real and have been going on for a long time.
- dash2 4mo agoI don’t understand why gerrymandering would require privacy violation, or how differential privacy would stop it.
- vlovich123 4mo agoGerrymandering is most effective when you know exact voting patterns of each household so you can draw the lines to get the result you want. Differential privacy blurs those boundaries and provides more room for the partisan hacks to make a fatal mistake.
- arjie 4mo agoPretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure. I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise. I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse. We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.
- Bratmon 4mo agoBut this article is about a decision to damage the census less. If you value an accurate census, you should be celebrating!
- swiftcoder 4mo agoTFA lays out why things don't work that way. If you erode trust in the privacy of census responses, an awful lot of folks will have to start lying on their census
- Bratmon 4mo agoI think the TFA was very light on evidence that people's desire to respond to the census is increased if the government fabricates the results later
- Dylan16807 4mo agoIf they follow the rules, preserving privacy via cruder methods, the data will be much more damaged. For any particular level of privacy, the banned methods can give you more accurate data. For any particular level of accuracy, the banned methods can give you better privacy. The only way we're getting more accurate data is if the new rule causes them to largely abandon privacy. That would be bad. Harm for no benefit.
- Kim_Bruning 4mo agohttps://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-data-differential-privacy https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-d...
- ProllyInfamous 4mo agoThe fines for non-compliance are low enough to remain silent. Do. The American Census Survey (randomly-selected long-form questionairre) is dangerously overinvasive.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo agoCan anyone explain to me the previous state and why it was desirable? I admittedly do not understand why people are getting riled up. I am not being difficult. I really don't understand the original state and the changed state here.
- layer8 4mo agoRead up here for example: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/census-briefs/c2020br-03.pdf https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bombcar 4mo agoThe real underlying issue is that (block, sex, age) is basically a unique identifier.
- ck2 4mo agoif you want to keep your sanity, I suggest silently adding the phrase "...for the next 950 days" every time you read some politically spiteful news like this because the next two years are going to become insanely miserable
- layer8 4mo agoIt’s highly uncertain what will happen in 950 days.
- ck2 4mo agoI think it's easy to predict some things that will happen in 950 days in 950 days there will be several hundred warehouses concentrating over a million people in this country including many thousands of children costing a quarter trillion dollars (already funded) and the Iran War will still be happening despite over a hundred declared "deals" and the US will be running Cuba (forcing millions to return there) statistical noise or the lack of it will be the least of our problems
- thih9 4mo agoI guess this could be implemented externally. Eg via some app that instructs respondents to enter a specific answer in a pseudorandomly chosen question. Of course security would be another question.
- ofcyes 4mo ago[dead]
- ThePhysicist 4mo agoI think it should be noted that there was a lot of dissatisfaction from users of the census data as far as I know. So it's not been banned just for politicals sake or because they hate privacy... Some people I talked to in the privacy field even called the whole thing a total disaster and weren't shy to put blame on John Abowd who apparently pushed this through despite a lot of internal opposition and concerns. Not sure if that's true, but what is definitely true is that the way the data was released produced serious issues downstream as most researchers and statisticians that ingested the data weren't prepared for receiving noisy data values. Differential privacy was applied in a way such that many invariants that data users cared about weren't preserved, which was expected as it's not possible as you can't preserve all invariants and at the same time add meaningful noise to the data. The thing is, with such a differentially private data release you need to adapt all of the downstream analyses to take into account the exact mechanism the data was altered in. And since the census bureau used a very intricate mechanism that didn't just add Laplace noise to data values but instead relied on a multi-stage process that preserved some invariants but not others it was very difficult to even write routines to account for the changes being made to the data. They essentially asked of every data user to rewrite their whole analysis pipeline based on the exact disclosure mechanism that contained a large number of bespoke choices regarding which data invariants to preserve and basically produced a mix of noisy, synthesized data that was just really hard to reason about. I don't even know if there even would've been a way to do this better, but the fact is that not every small county or school district has top-tier statisticians at hand that can just read a whole monograph on differentially private synthesized census data and then hotpatch their existing analysis systems to work with that data. I was a big fan of differential privacy but now I think it might be doing more harm than good, as I haven't seen a single case where it was applied successfully in a problem where it actually mattered, and it contributed strongly to discrediting and preventing a lot of work on other anonymization techniques as it was deemed the only way to preserve privacy by the research community, so showing up with enhancements to k-anonymity or any other noise mechanism not rooted in it was a sure way to get ridiculed and ignored. And it's just not a practical mechanism, even when it works for a single disclosure you always end up having to blow up the privacy budget to a ridiculous amount in order to keep disclosing statistics as otherwise you would for almost all real-world data run out of budget after a few publications. So, for me it's a technique that works in the areas where it doesn't really matter (publishing highly aggregated statistics that pose almost zero privacy risk even without differential privacy) and doesn't work in other areas where it would actually matter (publishing fine-grained data about individuals or small groups). There are some niche use cases but in my view the privacy community has really overblown the importance of differential privacy by portraying it as the only way to reliably anonymize data. BTW the German census bureau has an interesting approach to anonymization which they use for several decades already and so far I haven't heard of any cases of successful de-anonymization of the data, maybe the US bureau should have a look at that for their own needs.
- zkzk_gamal 4mo agoi think they will use ai as a leverage card to other country to order them
- yegortk 4mo agoData shall set you free... or not
- kajman 4mo agoI "enumerated" for the last census. Trust in my community was already not high* and I had lots of interesting encounters. I really believed the rather invasive data I was collecting with a friendly face would be used and handled responsibly. I feel for the poor souls that'll sign up to go door to door for 2030 now that the firewalls against weaponizing and monetizing all of our sensitive government data has been torn down, and even more for those that will volunteer information that can hurt them. The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality. I've grown very jaded now seeing all the things taken for granted in this country and lost or degraded recently with a whimper. *: To be fair, they sent me specifically to places that didn't respond, so I was naturally led to believe that everyone in my region hated the government, ignored bizzarrely threatening fliers, or had recently moved and had no knowledge of the inhabitants (if any) during the census period.
- sieabahlpark 4mo ago[dead]
- windthrown 4mo agoI did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.
- alterom 4mo ago>And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data. The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power). Amazing, innit.
- specialist 4mo agoThe worse things get, the better they do. It's an insidious, vicious cycle.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo agoI really have to take the anti-noise side here. I get why it's a hard problem, and I get why the Census Bureau thought this was a neat solution. But I'm imagining an accountant stepping through a similar chain of logic: * I want to accurately report the finances of our company to the best of my ability. * But that report would allow people to reconstruct private data about the terms of our contracts with various counterparties. I'd really like to avoid that, there's no rule that says we're supposed to release that data. In fact some of those contracts probably came with nondisclosure agreements! * So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to calculate our results to the best of my ability, and then I'm going to add random values to them and report only the randomized ones. Any reconstruction people try to do will be wrong because of the randomness. * If the SEC says "no, you need to report your actual numbers", I will explain to them that there's no such thing as an actual number because all data is noisy. I can't get behind it.
- mikelitoris 4mo agoBut why?? Differential privacy works? It's not even "woke" or whatever these people perceive. It's just math man...
- sherburt3 4mo agoSo "differential privacy" pretty much sounds like someone gets to modify the results of a census and how it gets modified is entirely up to their discretion. Seems like something that could be abused to achieve political objectives.
- nirava 4mo agothere are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*. know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing. If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.
- CGMthrowaway 4mo ago>there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous I hope so. What are they?
- shiandow 4mo agoNot really, it has to be random in a predetermined fashion to be considered differential privacy. It is reversible in the way that someone shouting over an aicraft producing white noise is intelligible. I guess someone could fiddle with the noise, but then why not nudge the originals? Or more insidiously, control what is published?
- sherburt3 4mo agoIf someone modified the original dataset and it was discovered they would be held accountable. However if you have a departmental policy of modifying the data for "privacy reasons" and it just so happened to surrepititiously affect some sort of political outcome then ah geez that just a wacky coincidence not any individuals fault.
- declan_roberts 4mo agoCensus data is extremely powerful. It's why some states lost house seats and why some gained house seats. It must therefore be maximally transparent. Do you want president Trump or palantir to decide on the "noise infusion" algorithm?
- pas 4mo agoheadcount doesn't have to be granular, it has to be accurate. this is about the very useful street- and block-level data. also, if how would anyone know how accurate the "transparent" number is? if Trump or Thiel can fuck with the fuzzing they can just as do so with the base data.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoAny privacy-diminishing changes at federal level happening during this administration are for one reason only: to amass more power in Conservative administration/governance. At the federal level it's Project 2025, at the state level it's making sure states stay red and disenfranchise minorities.
- Bratmon 4mo agoThis is a rare occasion of the Trump administration getting something right. Why even do a census if you're just going to synthesize random data as the last step?
- appreciatorBus 4mo ago> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. I think he has it backwards here. Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff. I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people other than statisticians to confront the trade-off. If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place. By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible. How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?
- closeparen 4mo agoName, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something). Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.
- bombcar 4mo agoIt would entirely be possible to limit the scope of things, by making sure the company that has your address (UPS or USPS, say) never has the other information. Each business would hand off a zero-knowledge identifier to you that you'd give to the others: Amazon would only know that the payment identifier they gave to you was fulfilled at VISA somehow, and then hand the package off to UPS with an identifier that they would never see again.
- thisisaman408 4mo agoI was going to build something cool with fable, and now it's banned, feeling disappointed
- chickensong 4mo agoTax info, criminal records, licenses, identification, and ownership, should be the only records. Census data is profiling, and that never ends well.
- firejake308 4mo ago> Maybe the goal is to force the U.S. Census to publish statistics that actually enable re-identification, to help with future gerrymandering efforts? In case you were wondering why the government would do this, yes, that's exactly why.
- mberning 4mo agoI have filled out census forms in the past and it was not a big imposition. During the last census I had supposed census workers showing up at my home multiple times and pushily asking for an in person interview. I told the guy that came initially that I was not interested as I had a full time job, a 5 year old, and newborn twins. He brazenly said “your wife can do it” with zero consideration that she was just cut open weeks prior. A couple weeks later he shows up again at like 7pm pounding on the door right in the middle of the kids bedtime routine. I told him it was a really unwelcome visit and sent him on his way. A couple weeks later a car comes rolling up to the house on a Saturday and the woman driving tells me she is the guys supervisor and they really want the interview. I explained to her the situation, the newborn babies, the previous encounters, etc. she seemed completely undeterred and just went right back to pestering. I told her if anybody from the census came back they should go ahead and bring the sheriff because I’d be calling for trespassing. They finally stopped bothering me.
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- cwmoore 4mo agoI know it is off topic, and the issues raised here are fairly profound, but I want to share the conformed idea of “Noise infusion banned for industries regulated by the FCC”
- oklahomasports 4mo agoThe arguments im seeing in here are that census data will lead to a literal holocaust. Histrionic. Makes it seem like this policy was a no brainer
- gigatexal 4mo agoYet another thing this admin is screwing up. News at 11. Let’s fix this in the midterms by voting out the republicans. That’s it. That should be the sum total of the platform: not republican and not crazy.
- roschdal 4mo agoroschdal
- eriktrautman 4mo agoAt the Republican TX state convention this week, they proposed to add wording against differential privacy to their proposed platform via an amendment, justified with an example from someone supposedly involved with the census of how it was common-sense silly because one homeless guy under a bridge can become five via DP. I don't know if it passed, but that's the grassroots push behind things like this.
- inigyou 4mo agoHow do you know that's grassroots?
- pollorollo 4mo agoThat's what confounds the media [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN98wmzisn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN98wmzisn4 (Excuse this poor quality, it was the only version I could find that wasn't tiktok)
- Loughla 4mo agoHaving worked behind the scenes at a state convention (granted, not in Texas), there is no such thing as grassroots announcements/efforts at those things.
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- GreenSalem 4mo agoThis is why for the census my forms said that I was a poor widow from Kazakhstan with 9 chidren , no education and an adherent of the Mandean faith. Never ever provide true information in any form.
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- trimethylpurine 4mo agoApplying subjectivity to what they keep and where it's bound, implies that this was always an expression of opinion. Science intrinsically ignores opinions. The officials responsible for this smearing of data should be tried. This was a violation of the free speech clause as it coercively manipulated public beliefs. This was a crime against science and civil rights.
- kccqzy 4mo agoAn earlier article on the same blog had some very useful information on how easily the aggregated census data from 2010 (before differential privacy) could be used to reconstruct real data for individuals: https://desfontain.es/blog/us-census-reconstruction-attack.html https://desfontain.es/blog/us-census-reconstruction-attack.h... I am personally convinced that the reason noise infusion was banned was because powerful people were already reconstructing individual data from census for the purpose of gerrymandering, and they wanted to continue gerrymandering.
- tgv 4mo agoOr worse. It allows anyone to build really targeted data sets. Insurance companies would love such data, and many of those will use them without scruples.
- thomasahle 4mo agoWhy do you need individual data for gerrymandering? Don't you only need area level?
- defrost 4mo agoTo optimally crack a district to bias in one parties favour it is often required to literally run a boundary down a street to separate one side (close to a university, say) from the other. Once you've table voter preferences to actual street addresses you are no longer in the realm of "broad area cumulative averages and medians".
- themgt 4mo agoMy favorite gerrymandering story was when I learned an ~800 student local college had been split down the middle, so students were in different congressional districts depending on their dorm building.
- ProllyInfamous 4mo agoThere is a stretch of US183 in Austin, Texas, which allows you to drive through seven congressional districts in a matter of minutes. Also see: Nashville, Tennessee Like your dormroom example, ATX is very progressive.
- khalic 4mo agoSounds like a great way to prevent finding irregularities
- mikkkee 4mo agoAmazing how the current US gov is finding every different way to destroy the country from every aspect every single day.
- zkmon 4mo agoAdding fake data (noise) officially to an important data such census, is the height of weirdness of the West. The nations are totally confused between privacy and visibility requirements. The privacy and freedom is effectively working against the very foundations of the nation, as the binding force between elements of a nation is directly affected by privacy. Excessive obsession with equality is another thing that works to erase any cognitive abilities of the people to recognize differences in gender, race, age, culture etc. Equality is good to a reasonable extent but it shouldn't be forced to an extent to erase the cognitive capabilities gained through evolution.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo agoOriginal HN title: Differential privacy banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
- m3047 4mo agoInteresting article, but I don't fully agree that it means what people seem to think it means. Note that the author says "People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts." I do surprising things with math on occasion, but I'm not a licensed statistician. I don't know what they do in private, but in public statisticians, or people trying to sound like them, seem to fool around with horseshoes and hand grenades a lot. The Census Bureau doesn't just do the decennial census. For instance due to a convoluted jurisdictional dispute (near as I can tell), I ended up on the agricultural census for several years (until they figured out I wasn't trying to make a profit). I have concerns about data privacy, but I'm more concerned with private entities trading in it and data integrity. I'm extremely concerned about the misuse of privately produced databases, especially by government functions. I get the impression that for a lot of folks the notion that private databases could be biased in the favor of the provider's interests in order to get favorable treatment from their customers or punish their detractors seems to be an "unknown unknown". We're veering into serious Dunning-Kruger territory attempting to use phone numbers, email addresses, and biometrics for identity / KYC. At this very moment the FCC is getting ready to order telecomms providers collect PII for people buying ALL phones, so they won't have any excuse not to sell that to all comers /s. Private armies are regulated in the United States, and private data brokers should be similarly regulated for largely congruent reasons.
- markcollins05 4mo ago[dead]