Comment by asolove
2 days ago
The 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.
You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it
It happened a year ago in this country, with IRS sharing data with ICE (breaking a longstanding policy of keeping taxpayer data private within the government).
If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.
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The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more.
The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.
There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government
If you don’t count people of different races, nationalities, origin, then you can pretend there are only white people. You don’t know if there are any marginalized people gathered in say an extremely poor neighborhood, because they are all people.
I see it as a way to pretend there’s just white people.
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Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.
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But a count of what?
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Wouldnt that hurt the conservative cause though?
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yeah,
and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form.
(1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full
Canada also did this to its Japanese
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Databases are neutral until someone asks them for a list.
Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now.
First they came for…
What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?
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I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion.
Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going.
When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immigrants from citizens. Gay from straight. Rich from well to do. And so on.
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How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely
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People with a legal right to vote.
As planned by whom?
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Immigrants don’t get a vote in many countries
For example Europeans were excluded from the Brexit vote
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1.) Migration is constant and big topic.
2.) Democracy happens to be destroyed by local far right movements, composed of people who were there for years and did not migrated anywhere.
The extend of foreign destruction is Vance trying to destroy democracy in Europe openly, Putin doing it secretly and Musk openly enciting pogroms. None of them immigrated to EU.
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Does anyone actually believe this crap?
You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?
You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people?
Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right?
"The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about.
It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.
You think they wouldn't use every tool available to then, including the census data?
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Yeah okay fair, I was about to post a knee jerk reaction, but it's well known that the US government can obtain higher quality data by just simply buying it from the public market.
> Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google.
Not everybody uses it and not everybody who uses it uses it naively enough to give access to useful identity info.
What's shocking is how people keep finding excuses. "what about Meta" is not one
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You think they wouldn't use it? They're using all the things they can get their hands on. The census also has side effects on the franchise.
> Does anyone actually believe this crap?
> You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?
I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal.
Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-...
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They haven't done a single thing without malicious intent. Go back and find whatever else you've defended in the past, and look at the results instead of the stated reason/goal for doing them. They won't match. They'll be opposites. You'll rationalize or shift blame, of course. But maybe this time, something decent will get through.
I'm not sure why your comment is grayed out.
Cell tower data, credit bureau integration, social media scraping, palantir, smart home device surveillance, DNA database exploitation, facial recognition networks, tax, payroll, passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases and many more...
The census is a historical relic used to jerrymander congressional seats, and that's about it.
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I have to agree. I'd like Census data to be private, but the cat is out of the bag.
I'm all for keeping all of this data private. But to think it isn't already available is a bit 'head in sand'. Maybe put laws in place for 'general' privacy across all data, before getting too inflamed about Census in particular.
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Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style?
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> The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data.
Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse.
The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level.
Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.
Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.
The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way.
The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.
The whole thing is over noise introduced to publicized documents to disguise the specifics of people in specific addresses, and malicious actors misrepresenting that as fraud.
For example census data was and probably is available on the block level but in order to avoid exposing the data of people living in these blocks that might be a few families, the publicized data aggregated and smoothed the data over blocks so you had cases where a block with a few single family residences reported over 100 people living in them. Obviously certain actors shouted voter fraud over the top of their lungs.
So now the law says no fudging of publicized data to preserver privacy, the government always had the actual accurate data.
The obvious solution to this problem is to just hide the sensitive data instead of fudging them.
In the above example the block would now report 10 people living there, but not their racial, religious, ethnic, or socioeconomic conditions.
> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.
What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood.
Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?
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There are plenty of other uses - knowing where to build stores to serve your target market, predicting possible pandemic vulnerabilities, etc.
This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.
This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.
The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.
Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.
I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective.
Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.
Yes.
Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data.
Why?
Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc.
All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1).
At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed?
(1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...
Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.
The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000
Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?
It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have.
Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion.
Thanks.
have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.
You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.
>It’s a census: it just asks questions.
Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.
There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.
> they’ll just lie or not answer
The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions.
In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face.
For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses.
1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census.
2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?
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The 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.
Congress 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.
Isn'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.
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