Differential privacy keeps that data private. It’s a mathematical framework whereby a statistical output can’t be used to determine any individual’s data in a dataset, and the bureau’s algorithm for differential privacy is called TopDown. It injects “noise” into the data starting at the highest level (national), moving progressively downward. There are certain constraints placed around the kind of noise that can be introduced—for instance, the total number of people in a state or census block has to remain the same. But other demographic characteristics, like race or gender, are randomly reassigned to individual records within a set tranche of data. This way, the overall number of people with a certain characteristic remains constant, while the characteristics associated with any one record don’t describe an individual person. In other words, you’ll know how many women or Hispanic people are in a census block, just not exactly where.
On August 28, Republican Representative August Pfluger introduced the COUNT Act. If passed, it would add a citizenship question to the census and force the Census Bureau to “cease utilization of the differential privacy process.” Pfluger’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This makes census data useless as no one will respond honestly. Everyone is now a male blond haired, blue eyed, evangelical christian of northern european heritage named John Smith with $250,000/yr income. (As far as you know)
That’s hardly useless. If everyone is blonde haired and blue eyed hetero etc. they have even more justification to cut programs that benefit anyone outside this demographic.
Do you think these people need excuses or data to validate their actions?
No, but the falsified data isn’t useless just because it isn’t aligning with reality. It’ll absolutely be suitable for propaganda purposes.
Propaganda doesn’t need data.
Yeah, we all need to be minority women of wildly varying income levels. Make the “great replacement” fuckers shake in their boots!
Don’t worry guys, no fascist regime has used a census to locate and arrest targeted populations for almost 100 years now… this should be fine.
/s because some people can’t read subtext
Just need to start a rumor that this will allow the government to identify GUN OWNERS, for some future gun CONFISCATION effort. Cart_catalog
I look forward to a large contingent of MAGA voters suddenly insisting that they are now, among other things, experts on statistical methodology and census operations. You know, topics that they knew nothing about last week. Or this week. Rirere
That’s a fact not a rumor
There is a reason the Netherlands anonymized their public healthcare records after Hitler’s invasion
