[HN Gopher] Privacy concerns are breaking the Census
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Privacy concerns are breaking the Census
Author : bpodgursky
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-01-26 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.slowboring.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.slowboring.com)
| uoaei wrote:
| Title should be "Census is broken because it does not handle
| privacy concerns"
|
| Yglesias once again looking at the right thing and getting
| exactly the wrong conclusion out of it.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| We had obligatory census in Poland.
|
| Truth be told, seeing the state of our governement, I fully
| expect all of it to leak out sooner or later. :|
| fitblipper wrote:
| I hate the argument this blog uses. Just because your data is
| available and abused through websites A, B, and C doesn't mean
| you should add your private data to site D.
|
| If I'm trying to avoid catching Covid-19 by limiting exposure but
| have to go the the grocery story, the doctors, and the gas
| station it doesn't mean I should also go to a music concert since
| I'm already unable to avoid exposure.
| 8note wrote:
| i dont think thats a comparable case. the avaiable and abusd
| would mean you caught and recovered from covid via the grocery
| store, and youre avoiding future exposure from the music
| concert while already immune
| giaour wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| Its gerrymandering level 2.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Wow, if privacy is the concern then it makes a heck of a lot more
| sense not to publish fine grained data. Keep it at the tract
| level instead of block since those are more closely defined by
| the population size living in them-- usually a few thousand.
|
| Giving purposely bad data is much worse than no data.
| jefftk wrote:
| The language of "do not disclose the information reported by, or
| on behalf of, any particular respondent" really does look to me
| like it requires Differential Privacy. Otherwise the different
| aggregations will reveal information for some participants.
|
| It's unfortunate that this means the Census isn't accurately
| presenting information needed for fair representation, but I
| don't think this is something that can be fixed by attempting to
| shame the Census for putting out "inaccurate information"?
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| I have similar hesitations about registering to vote in my state
| (North Carolina) because it makes voter record data available to
| "Any person upon request and for a fee. Free lists are provided
| upon request to political parties." [1]. My name, address, etc.
| ended up on dozens of sketchy websites after registering to vote
| previously. Privacy conscious legislation can't come soon enough.
|
| [1]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-
| campaigns/access...
| arcbyte wrote:
| If the government knows it, the same data should be available
| to all citizens. Traffic camera feeds, voter data, medicare
| claims, everything. With minor, very narrow restrictions for
| the very latest military secrets.
| thebean11 wrote:
| You don't see any practical issues with that approach..? Do
| you know how much personal information is in a medicare
| claim?
| katbyte wrote:
| I see you've never been stalked harassed threatened or dealt
| with people trying to make your life hell.
| skeptical2 wrote:
| The government goons are some of the worst stalkers and
| harassers, which is exactly why they should never be
| allowed to collect this data in the first place. Our
| Founders understood this, but unfortunately, humans
| generally never learn anything from history.
| mehlmao wrote:
| The Constitution calls for a census (Enumeration) every
| ten years. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/Article_1_S
| ection_2.pdf
| skeptical2 wrote:
| Tostino wrote:
| Heh if you think that's bad check out FL
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| I feel the same way about donating to political campaigns. It's
| just not worth it considering that that information is then
| public record and could be used against you in all sorts of
| ways. Perhaps I will feel different when I'm older and of I've
| enough money that I no longer need to worry about damaging my
| job prospects.
|
| Maybe it would make it ok to donate if you also found a likable
| person on the other side to give money to at the same time.
| brimble wrote:
| I'm like this with magazine subscriptions. Seeing my junkmail
| double after subscribing to one not-cheap literary quarterly
| was enough to convince me never to subscribe to any sort of
| periodical again. God knows who else they sold my info to.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| When I updated my address for voter registration a couple of
| years ago, I noticed my phone number was wrong so I updated it
| too. Huge mistake. I rarely received spam texts or telemarketer
| calls and now I receive both constantly. It started just a
| couple of months after the change. Even without those two
| annoyances, the political spam texts are nightmarish. They're
| basically DDOS attacks because the lists are distributed to
| large numbers of volunteers using their own phones to send out
| texts. It doesn't matter how many numbers you block, the next
| day there are dozens more text from dozens of other numbers.
| And since they're political campaign texts, they are legal due
| to the exemption politicians gave themselves to the anti-spam
| laws. Right now we're in a lull between elections so the number
| of political texts is small but as we get close to the
| midterms, it will become an all day affair. In 2020 it peaked
| at over 80 political texts in a single day. Not sure why they
| think this is effective in making anyone like them but they
| keep at it.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| > Not sure why they think this is effective in making anyone
| like them but they keep at it.
|
| It could be the other party trying to make you hate their
| opponent (a "False Flag" operation).
| mateo1 wrote:
| Some data have to be public for them to be audited by multiple
| independent parties. It is absolutely necessary for democracy
| to function. I don't see what harm can be done by someone
| knowing your name and address.
| Ayyninymous223 wrote:
| [deleted]
| cpwright wrote:
| If the census simply enumerated the population, then I don't
| think there are the same level of concerns.
|
| The data they are collecting related to demographics is beyond
| what is necessary for congressional apportionment. If they
| collected only the required data; then there would not be a need
| to fuzz it.
| gruez wrote:
| >Private companies are already scrutinizing your purchase
| patterns to determine that you are pregnant and then potentially
| getting in hot water for notifying relatives you haven't actually
| informed.
|
| >Given that baseline reality, compromising the usefulness of
| Census data for the sake of minimal privacy gains seems really
| bad.
|
| The difference is that you can opt out of various companies
| collecting data. Can you opt out of the census? With this sort of
| argument, you can basically justify any sort of government
| privacy intrusion because private companies are already doing it,
| so "compromising the usefulness of NSA surveillance data for the
| sake of minimal privacy gains seems really bad". You do want to
| stop terrorists and pedophiles, don't you?
| viscountchocula wrote:
| I think you're significantly overestimating the practical
| ability to opt out of commercial collection. Governmental and
| commercial collection seem equally non-opt-outable to me.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >The difference is that you can opt out of various companies
| collecting data. Can you opt out of the census?
|
| I'm going to assume that this isn't a rhetorical question.
|
| Yes. Just don't fill out the form. And if the Census folks send
| folks to your house, you can pretend not to be home, politely
| ask them to leave, or in states that allow it, shoot such
| trespassers _dead_.
|
| In fact, I'd prefer it if those who live in areas that
| consistently elect folks from $PARTY whose platform is _more
| disagreeable_ to me do exactly that.
|
| That way, when congressional districts are redrawn, the $PARTY
| that annoys me more will have a harder time getting elected.
| Redistricting is, after all, the _primary_ purpose of the
| Census.
|
| Edit: Less is more.
| gruez wrote:
| >Yes. Just don't fill out the form. And if the Census folks
| send folks to your house, you can pretend not to be home,
| politely ask them to leave, or in states that allow it, shoot
| such trespassers dead.
|
| Just like paying taxes is optional because all you have to do
| is not send money to the IRS, and if they come you shoot them
| dead?
|
| >The participation of every citizen in the United States
| Census of 2020 was mandatory by the law by Article I, Section
| 2 of the American constitution. Census is carried out in the
| U.S. every ten years to count the correct population in the
| country. The figures obtained in the 2020 Census were
| particularly helpful in determining congressional
| representation and community funding.
| teddyh wrote:
| I would certainly rather they erred on the side of privacy. If
| the data cannot be released without compromising privacy, I would
| rather it not be released at all.
| djbebs wrote:
| You mean collected.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Definition of privacy derangement syndrome, right there.
|
| This is superficial "privacy" which affords no marginal
| improvement in your actual privacy but does concretely break
| the Census.
| bigyellow wrote:
| Where is that definition from? I couldn't find it in DSM-5.
|
| Also, why is the Census (or any collective action) more
| important than an individual's subjective view of privacy (or
| any private thought)?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > Where is that definition from? I couldn't find it in
| DSM-5.
|
| The term defines itself. I assume you understand what is
| meant by Privacy Derangement Syndrome, something like:
| valuing privacy above all other virtues. For example,
| somebody who refuses to use a mobile phone due to iOS
| privacy concerns, and falls out of touch with family and
| friends.
|
| But I don't even really appreciate this point even as a
| joke. The idea that every possible mental malady is
| constrained and gatekept by a single book seems entirely
| too rigid.
|
| The subjective view of privacy has some value, I'll grant
| that, but so to does a municipality preparing to lay
| infrastructure to support a growing population. When it
| comes to tangible value, the census is one of the most
| well-known value-adding resources I can think of.
|
| I almost never argue against privacy, and policies and
| measures protecting individual privacy. But the US census
| is value-adding for research, policy, and individual
| purposes, let there be no doubt.
| skeptical2 wrote:
| skeptical2 wrote:
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The point is that there is no meaningful gain in privacy, and
| it comes at the cost of crippling important research.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Do you think infrastructure planning is important?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I mean, if you don't like the research, it also directly
| directly impacts voting representation and where federal
| grant money is distributed, to target the intended
| demographics and population. Basing either of those on
| random noise is very very bad.
| throwaway058527 wrote:
| parkingrift wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why we need the census at all? Why are
| we actively pretending that the federal government doesn't have
| precise estimates for where people live?
| brimble wrote:
| The way we live in a complete surveillance state _except_ when
| it would in any way provide convenience, at which point we have
| to pretend we don 't, is something I find irritating on a
| pretty regular basis.
| pueblito wrote:
| It's a constitutional requirement, Article 1 section 2
| spicyusername wrote:
| > have precise estimates for where people live?
|
| The census is how they have that estimate...
| kodah wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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/111494218027827...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I see. You're right, I misunderstood what the attack vector
| is supposed to be here.
| giaour wrote:
| The 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.
| tharne wrote:
| The Census has really lost the thread. The original mission was
| simply to do a headcount to determine how many representatives
| and electoral votes each state was entitled to.
|
| One thing that annoyed me in particular was their creepy
| obsession around race. Even once you answer, "White", there are
| several more questions aimed at determining precisely what
| subcategory of white person you are.
|
| If anyone at the census is listening, here's some advice. If you
| only get to ask Americans a handful of question once every ten
| years, don't waste half of them trying to figure out someone's 50
| shades of whiteness.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| This is important for understanding how gerrymandered a
| district is.
| tharne wrote:
| > This is important for understanding how gerrymandered a
| district is.
|
| That's a bit circular. One of the main reasons that districts
| are so easy to gerrymander is precisely because there is so
| much rich census data that can be used to predict voting
| patterns.
| brimble wrote:
| Parties and campaigns already buy & maintain huge private
| databases on this stuff. They wouldn't hesitate to buy
| slightly more to have that info, because gerrymandering is
| so powerful.
|
| Watchdogs and groups trying to fight gerrymandering
| (racially-tilted or otherwise) usually don't have as many
| resources. It's harder for the public to keep an eye on
| this without public data, while keeping it private-only
| barely inconveniences the most relevant bad actors.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The issue is specifically gerrymandering on the basis of
| race.
|
| Parties know their votes by precinct, those data are
| available.
|
| Apportionment of voting districts must be done by
| _population_ , so the Census is necessary. Discrimination
| on the basis of race violates multiple Constitutional
| amendments and voting laws, for which _enforcement_
| requires clear knowledge of demographics.
|
| The justirications are somewhat involved, but not strictly
| circular.
|
| For a discussion of the background, from a conservative
| viewpoint, see: "Redistricting, Race, and the Voting Rights
| Act" (2010). This touches on the question multiple times,
| this passage captures much of the circumstance, though I
| recommend reading the full piece:
|
| _[T]he South 's swift and effective circumvention of the
| Voting Rights Act in the wake of its passage demonstrated
| the truth of what many civil-rights activists had argued:
| that merely providing access to the ballot was insufficient
| after centuries of slavery, another century of segregation,
| ongoing white racism, and persistent resistance to black
| political power. In the Deep South in 1969 (and beyond),
| the alternative to de facto reserved legislative seats for
| black candidates would have been the perpetuation of
| whites-only politics._
|
| https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/redistr
| i...
| ironman1478 wrote:
| Its probably possible to gerrymander a state without this
| information? Sure, it would be harder (and probably less
| effective) but you could use proxy metrics to figure out
| the distribution of race within a state. I imagine I could
| use housing data as a proxy for example, given that
| property values are correlated with race. I don't have
| exact proof of that last statement, but it feels right.
|
| Also, I did some reading. Apparently the census has been
| asking these questions since 1790
| https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-
| questio.... Though, I imagine the nature of the question
| has changed over time.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| This isn't true, each voting precinct reports vote totals
| each election.
|
| Demographic info adds almost no predictive value over this.
| caymanjim wrote:
| That's not the purpose of the census, though. That's a
| political and social concern, and people can debate the value
| of that data and who should collect it, but it's not part of
| the Constitutional mandate to count the number of people.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-
| census/abo....
|
| Unless I misunderstood your question and you meant to say
| that the race portion specifically is not.
| 8note wrote:
| If you're going to count some Americans as less than a person
| when determining the electoral votes based on their race,
| you're going to have to know the race of the respondents.
| Collecting race data is then part of the original mission
| mullingitover wrote:
| > One thing that annoyed me in particular was their creepy
| obsession around race. Even once you answer, "White", there are
| several more questions aimed at determining precisely what
| subcategory of white person you are.
|
| This isn't really on the census. This is just the census trying
| to account for Americans' creepy obsession with race. Let's not
| forget that for most of this country's history, your race was
| _everything_.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's not actually up to the Census. They're following OMB
| Directive 15 on race reporting standards for all federal data
| collection. You can read it here:
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1997-10-30/pdf/97-286...
|
| This is the latest version, but it was originally published in
| 1977 and based on the idea that humanity consisted of only four
| races. The reason it asks what "kind of white person" you are
| is the 1997 update was in response to criticism that this
| wasn't fine-grained enough, so they split Pacific Islander into
| its own group and split white people into Hispanic and Non-
| Hispanic. The idea of there only being four races in the world
| comes from Carleton Coon's publications from the early 60s. He
| had a theory that human races all evolved independently from
| Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, in contrast to the more widely
| accepted "out of Africa" theory, and that this accounts for why
| some races, according to him, are "more civilized" than others.
| That is, humans left Africa in a savage state and evolved into
| sapiens form and developed civilization much earlier in Europe
| and Asia, again, according to him.
|
| I think it should be obvious why making a theory like this the
| basis of US official federal standards for race is somewhat
| controversial, but as we know, laws and regulations change
| slowly, if ever, so the Census is kind of stuck defending work
| they're legally charged with doing, and this data is used to
| assess things like racial equity of federal spending and
| assessment of the fair housing act and what not. It's kind of a
| relic of our shitty history, but it's there.
| willis936 wrote:
| You're misrepresenting what a census is and why they are done
| (yes, including historically since the US began and even
| before).
|
| You might not like the idea of being accounted for, but that
| negates exactly zero benefit to society that census brings. How
| can the rulemakers make informed decisions if they're blind?
| overboard2 wrote:
| By making less decisions
| willis936 wrote:
| I appreciate the honesty. Fallaciously pushing an issue for
| dishonest reasons damages representation in politics.
|
| If you dislike the census because you hate big gov't then
| it should be left there, even if you know it's not a
| popular opinion.
| HedgingPointer wrote:
| It seems as thought this author has never read any materials on
| inference control...
|
| Ross Anderson's Security Engineering Chapter 9 is all about this
| https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SEv2-c09.pdf (Anderson
| releases the textbook free online)
|
| This is a fairly well developed field (i.e., in medicine there
| highly screened "Medical Statisticians" who give data to research
| groups only after it's properly anonymized. They know beforehand
| what the researchers are interested in, and introduce noise that
| effects all the measures _except_ the ones the researchers said
| they were interested in looking at beforehand.
|
| > The idea behind the differential privacy strategy, as I
| understand it, is that you can basically introduce statistical
| noise into the block-level results in a way that will make it
| impossible to reverse-engineer the demographic profile of people
| who live at specific addresses.
|
| >This has, I think, roughly zero real-world privacy value
|
| This was painful to read...
| bpodgursky wrote:
| There is an enormous practical difference between allowing
| inference of medical conditions (PHI deidentification) and
| allowing in edge cases the inference of information that is
| already available in public voter registration rolls.
| giaour wrote:
| > allowing in edge cases the inference of information that is
| already available in public voter registration rolls.
|
| This is a really inaccurate way to characterize what
| researchers were able to obtain from reidentification attacks
| on block-level data from the 2010 census:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/can-set-equations-
| ke...
| droidist2 wrote:
| > They know beforehand what the researchers are interested in,
| and introduce noise that effects all the measures _except_ the
| ones the researchers said they were interested in looking at
| beforehand.
|
| Isn't there a danger in the census statisticians doing the same
| thing? That they'll introduce noise that affects looking at the
| data in ways that they didn't anticipate or allow for. Or even
| that hinders drawing conclusions that go against current dogma.
| mindslight wrote:
| First, the article would read much better without a pejorative
| outgroup reference of " _weirdo living off the grid_ ",
| especially in its opening paragraph!
|
| In general we would have to be much less guarded about the
| collection of personal information if we had laws prohibiting its
| harmful use ala the GDPR. Presently, anything that is collected
| becomes fair game for the advertising-surveillance industry's
| monetization, manipulation, and indefinite storage. So an entity
| with a bona fide use for personal information (eg The Census)
| cannot be trusted because resisting collection of such data is
| currently the only way to prevent yourself from being abused. And
| while I agree practically the Census isn't really collecting much
| data that the surveillance industry doesn't already have, this
| dynamic still informs societal norms.
| aaron695 wrote:
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(page generated 2022-01-26 23:01 UTC)