[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.