Why the 2020 census has 9 fake people in a single house

Anonimizing data to convince the public their information Is safe instead of gathering accurate data is exactly the kind of inefficiency that must be expelled from government.<p>I worked census out of a duty of democracy. Overwhelmingly the people I interviewed thought it was completely useless, that the &quot;government already knew&quot;, or that I was secretly the IRS. There are multiple instances of door slamming, hostile threats, and people who thought that I was somehow the representative of the president of the United States. A guy ran me down in the road to tell me I &quot;ain&#x27;t no fbi agent&quot; after I left a census flyer on their door. Census bureau were almost trying to get us killed at this point since we were not allowed to have self defense with us. They wanted us to go to known meth labs, quote: &quot;anecdotal comments are not justification.&quot;.<p>Multiple others on our team had a gun waved at them when they went to do reinterviews (checking others work) because the original worker got that information from a neighbor to avoid the threat. But the census system doesn&#x27;t allow you to do that without attempting the actual location a number of times (annoying them).<p>There is one solution to all of this, and that is to return to the constitutional requirements. The single number of how many people live there. Nothing about money or jobs or anything else. But I&#x27;m afraid the census has already destroyed that opportunity, the 2010 &quot;long forms&quot; are now forever associated with the census.

&gt;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?<p>&gt;McSherry suggested a scenario involving banks or insurance companies using reconstructed data to discriminate on the basis of racial or ethnic categories.<p>...<p>&gt;But discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity is illegal,<p>That seems glaringly uncritical. It seems awfully close to &quot;Well that couldn&#x27;t happen because it&#x27;s illegal!&quot;.<p>&gt;But there’s a simple solution to this that even skeptics like Ruggles support: get rid of the smallest blocks.<p>But they&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s not really its job to provide data to academics for research. So the priority of &quot;Do your job&quot; vs &quot;Do this other thing that&#x27;s not really your job&quot; weighs <i>massively</i> in favour of &quot;Do your job&quot;. 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&#x27;s not their job.

&gt; In a [court filing](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.almd.75040&#x2F;gov.uscourts.almd.75040.41.1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&#x2F;recap&#x2F;gov.uscourts.almd.75...</a> ) last April, Abowd wrote that “our simulated attack showed that a conservative attack scenario using just 6 billion of the over 150 billion statistics released in 2010 would allow an attacker to accurately re-identify at least 52 million 2010 Census respondents (17% of the population) and the attacker would have a high degree of confidence in their results with minimal additional verification or field work.”<p>What would &quot;<i>re-identification</i>&quot; expose?<p>For example, say Alice is re-identified: what does the attacker then know about Alice?

That&#x27;s interesting but what I reacted to was this paragraph;<p>&gt;According to census data, this block—and hence this house—had 14 residents in 2020: one Hispanic person, seven white people, three biracial people (white and black), two multi-racial people (white, black, and American Indian), and one person of “some other race.” There were supposedly eight adults and six children living in the house.<p>Why is this important? I love how they trail off at the end there. So if you don&#x27;t qualify for bi-racial you&#x27;re &quot;some other race&quot;. What if your grandparents were biracial? Does that make you some other race? Where does this end?<p>Don&#x27;t mistake this for me trying to make a point about &quot;woke&quot;. I&#x27;m a Swede who truly finds it fascinating how the United States emphasize people&#x27;s &quot;race&quot; instead of their heritage (nationality).

Differential Privacy is an awesome field of study and is something being used at huge scale all over industry (Apple folks are BIG on this.<p>I think it’s an awesome technique, but seems there is some misunderstanding about the usefulness of the technique ITT.

Technical explanation by minutephysics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pT19VwBAqKA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pT19VwBAqKA</a><p>The amount of privacy is configurable, and researchers who would like to tune it (in either direction) can make a plea so the public can decide the amount of privacy loss they&#x27;re willing give up in order to aid research.<p>Each culture is different and has different tolerances for privacy and amount of intrusiveness.

I don&#x27;t get it, why go through the trouble of releasing block level information if you are going to release incorrect numbers?<p>Just don&#x27;t release block level data, keep it in the county or election district.

My solution to this was remarkably simple. When the census person came by, I told them I lived in my house and shut the door. There is no obligation to give any other information, at all.

Real privacy is only part of the equation. Accuracy will depend on the perception of privacy, letting people feel at ease about being honest.

I don&#x27;t believe that house residents are being changed in order to stop identification attacks. That simply doesn&#x27;t have the ring of truth, and in no other earlier press release or discussion about the Census did I ever see that mentioned.<p>This Census action actually doesn&#x27;t stop that attack from materializing. It is known and possible to purchase DMV records that give information about residents. People already do this <i>all the time.</i> I&#x27;ll guarantee you that DMV records are overall more correct than Census data.<p>It&#x27;s just the intentional recording of falsified data.

Some likely reasons for privacy: protect against gerrymandering, automated marketing, etc.

when I read this what came to mind was renormalization. the cancellation process of adding to some and removing from others

or....how we messed up COVID data and election data for giggles....

&quot;The U.S. census is a direct count of every resident. Required by the Constitution, it has taken place every decade since 1790.&quot;<p>&quot;The data it collects is used to determine political representation in Congress and to direct more than $1.5 trillion in federal funding annually.&quot;<p>Serious questions...<p>1.) What data are they anonymizing? Especially by &quot;randomizing numbers by taking numbers in one place to another place&quot;, doesn&#x27;t this defeat the purpose of a census?<p>2.) Are they asking your political affiliation? I never got asked this, rather just: &quot;how many people live here&quot; - this is all I was asked.<p>3.) What other questions are they asking residents? Is it different in each state? What are they doing with this data? Is it legal?<p>4.) Isn&#x27;t this then number used to assign how many &quot;congressional seats&quot; go to which state?

Flip a coin. Heads you answer the truth. Tails you flip again: heads you answer A, tails you answer not A. Construct a binary tree as required.

The census should be done by overhead satellite images using statistical approaches. It doesn’t matter precisely how many people there are, because that is changing every day.

What I find more troubling is that I know for a fact of several people who did not respond to the surveys and were then never again contacted&#x2F;followed up with as was indicated they would be.<p>That was in specific area, which, along with other knowledge and experience with working with the Census bureau years earlier, even before they were in the news for being extremely behind the curve ball even before the pandemic; makes me extremely concerned that the data is not at all accurate.<p>From my perspective it is not at all unreasonable that the 2020 Census data may have a lot more “noise” in order to cover up inaccuracy.<p>I suspect that with some data analysis it should be relatively easy to at least get an indication of something being of between the 2010 and 2020 census along with the community surveys.<p>I have been around these things in the FedGov and what I know does not at all give me a lot of confidence about this “noise for privacy” explanation. Does anyone know if they announced this move to increased “privacy” a long time ago or if it’s just a relatively recent thing? I am not aware of such an announcement. All the sudden the government is concerned with privacy???