Comment by newZWhoDis
1 day ago
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?
The census data is probably too stale in most cases to really act on in the way people expect. They used it in the 1940s because that was all they really had. But today it would be stupid to use when you already have backdoors into cell and internet service.
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
Forget meta. Your cell service providor also gives data to three letter agencies. Your bank does too. Your utility companies. Every thing or concept you might engage with will probably hand over data to three letter agencies. You post on HN after all, I'm sure they do it here too.
my bank and cell provider and utility company don't ask for my race
anyway let's stop whatabouting:) we are talking about census
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-...
That isn't the census. Census data is stale. These data are not stale. If you no longer qualify for medicaid you need to update medicaid office within 10 days for example.
You act like anybody is actually following that.
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.
Census data provides a reliable source to build off of, which makes joining between data sets more reliable. A lot of what you're talking about would be partial prints of an identity that have to be joined up with others to give reliable data.
Eg
> Cell tower data
That's just going to get you a subscriber and device ID, unless you're talking about going deep packet inspection and parsing the contents of the packets. You could, but that's a lot of effort to get something the census can hand you for free.
> credit bureau integration
Notoriously unreliable and identities for the purpose of credit get stolen constantly. The easiest way to clean that is against known-good info, like the census.
> social media scraping
Half the profiles are fake, also not reliable data unless you clean it up. Again, census data makes it very easy to cut out profiles that don't match a real person.
> tax, payroll
These are probably fairly reliable, although they usually won't tell you about a person's demographics.
> passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases
There's an enormous part of the population that won't appear in these at all. The huge part of the country that's "working poor" but not poor enough for Medicaid probably aren't traveling internationally. I wouldn't be surprised if half the country doesn't appear in any of these.
The census has value in that it contains a huge depth of information, is tied with your identity, citizens are compelled by law to answer so even the privacy folks have to respond and lying on it is a crime (enforcement is probably non-existent, though).
I'm sure that can all be reconstructed to some level of accuracy given sufficient effort, but that's a lot harder and requires a ton more coordination than "SELECT * FROM census_data WHERE ..."
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It's gray because people downvoted it.
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?
Data mining companies?
Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.
I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so I know they don't have omniscience.
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You’d be surprised how bad/incomplete the data usually is and how much work it takes to make those datasets really useful or reliable.
That’s one reason Xoom Info was able to sell for a billion dollars and even their data has a lot of junk
Having well curated detailed census data would be a major boon for the data brokers
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