[ken]

The US census was infamously used to assist in rounding up Americans of specific ethnic backgrounds for concentration camps.

It would go a long way to easing people’s minds if they had some way to guarantee that this could not happen again. I realize there is value in gathering attributes beyond just “one person”, but storing these attributes in a way that can be connected to addresses seems seriously problematic.

[yardstick]

I agree that the data should be treated anonymously and confidentially, with severe punishment to abuses.

Would the lack of census data prevented the concentration camps from operating? It may have instead taken longer and required more people, but I would expect that at the time anyone with a Japanese/Chinese look or name to have been detained anyway. Side note: It seems even the 2nd amendment didn’t help citizens resist agains oppression.

I suspect these days the government has enough information already on its citizens through other means (intelligence agencies etc) than the census, to still target based on race if they wanted to.

Immediately after 9-11 the discrimination against Muslim, Arabic and other minorities was rather pronounced. No census data needed to that either. People just judged by visual appearance or name.

[ken]

> I agree that the data should be treated anonymously and confidentially, with severe punishment to abuses.

What constitutes "abuse"? Differential privacy is hard. Once the data has been collected, simply not being an expert in statistics can be enough to accidentally leak sensitive data. The government is simultaneously the data collector, data user, and prosecutor of abuses, so I'm skeptical that much will come of any such promise. Maybe a letter of apology in 50 years.

> I suspect these days the government has enough information already on its citizens through other means (intelligence agencies etc) than the census, to still target based on race if they wanted to.

Pointing out that ethnic minorities are likely to be screwed anyway in such a situation, even without census data, is not going to ease anyone’s mind.

[pmoriarty]

"the data should be treated anonymously"

The problem is "anonymous" data is often really easy to de-anonymize, especially when there's so much unique, identifying information there, as there is with the census.

Even if it did somehow manage to remain anonymous, they could still tell that a person with some undesirable characteristics lived at such and such a location. That would be enough to round people up. They don't necessarily have to know your name.

[Wohlf]

France had the same issue with Jews being rounded up during Nazi occupation with help from government data, their answer was to no longer collect data on ethnicity.