[bagels]

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.

[dnautics]

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

[Alive-in-2025]

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.

[DaSHacka]

Why would a conservative want to pretend that? When was the last time you actually talked to one?

[nullc]

Do you think the only, or even primary, thing that determines if a person is marginalized is the color of their skin? -- even taking that you're talking about a POOR neighborhood as a prior?

[mvdtnz]

What an utterly ludicrous thing to say.

[Arodex]

Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.

[inigyou]

MAGA is conservatism. Political factions evolve over time.

[MajorTakeaway]

It's not the entirety of conservatism, however the Tea Party evolved into MAGA and got what they wanted. Generalisations lead to fallacies, have a nice day.

[coldtea]

The problem is not that MAGA "ate them, chew them and spit them", but that the traditional neoliberal shit GOP circles "ate, chew and spit" the MAGA movement and what people voted Trump for. Instead Trump was fully assimilated to the Borg/Swamp, with a big fuck you to the MAGA promises (except the show he put on about immigration).

[Dylan16807]

Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

And I wouldn't say he served existing entrenched interests very well either. To the extent he touched the swamp it was to put in worse people only he liked.

[kube-system]

Oh he is, but the “swamp” he was talking about the entire time is impartial civil service.

What they’re doing to people at the front lines of our government is very sinister and intentional. They’re using a whole host of (legally dubious or plainly illegal) methods to remove lifelong experienced workers with expertise in their field and replacing them with political appointees.

It is the purest form of anti-intellectualism as policy. They don’t want civil service to have the correct answer - they want it to have the answer that matches the ideology they want.

[coldtea]

>Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

Doesn't matter for the point of the argument, he was elected on that promise, and others, that he eventually broke.

[lazide]

It was so transparent that it was going to happen, I really question if anyone legitimately believed it.

Might as well have literally voted for the fox to be in charge of the hen house. ‘Oh no, but they promised they wouldn’t do that!’

[Dylan16807]

If you want to argue the problem is he got "assimilated" then you have to argue he originally would have made a real attempt to fulfill the promise. My assessment is: no way.

[Arodex]

If only there had been clues he might be a liar... Really, it was completely unexpected, he used to be so honest.

[xnx]

But a count of what?

[oh_my_goodness]

A count of people.

[xnx]

All people or citizen people?

[oh_my_goodness]

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S2-C3-1/...

[radiator]

Population in a city?

[boppo1]

Wouldnt that hurt the conservative cause though?

[fragmede]

Count of people - brown people removed = success

[DaSHacka]

More like `people - brown people = success` among the crowd

[dathinab]

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

[wahnfrieden]

Canada also did this to its Japanese

[wahnfrieden]

Interesting to see this downvoted. The mechanism was different - not a tax scheme, but rather the Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.

[dathinab]

> Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.

While the mechanism was different that was what _effectively_ happened to US Japanese people, too. The taxes part is more like a separate mechanism of discrimination against anyone "new" which "happened" to overlap with this (and tbh. I have no idea to which degree this overlap was intentional or just "tolerated").

--

But if I have to guess why someone down voted the comment (not me) ti might be because it feels a bit like trying to downplaying how bad and against the values the US claimed it stood for, this was. And doing so by pointing at some random other country and saying "they also did bad things so we aren't that bad" which is a really bad argument.

Just because others also have done bad things doesn't mean anything is less bad, or more reasonable or more excusable.

I mean a lot of countries did some pretty bad things in the past, especially the past 200 years.

When I post about stuff like that it's isn't about saying "hey they are bad". It's more because I think people from countries should be aware about all the bad stuff their country did/was done in their country. So that they can learn from this.

But sadly most countries try to bury most mistake, atrocities, large scale crimes etc. in history or at least exclude them from anything thought proactively, e.g. in school. And the only way to know about them is to go looking for them by yourself in your free time. Which doesn't work well even if you care as it's hard to learn what you don't know you don't know.

Like as a random example the tulsa race massacre should be required teaching in middle school with focus on the dynamics which lead to a mob of people including people in governing positions to thinking it is okay to try to lynch a whole district (more or less, simplified).

Or e.g. in Canada there is the genocide of indigenous people (which by now might be through about in school, not sure).

Or in Germany the genocide against Jews (which is thought a lot in middle school as required teaching material).

Or the crimes Japan committed against China in WW2 and before (which they still bury very deeply AFIK).

Or a pretty long list of atrocities in China science 1900.

The important part here isn't teaching "that" it happened, but "why/how" it happened, so that if stuff goes in the same bad direction again people realize it and (hopefully) stop it.

If we don't learn from the past I really don't know how humans as a species expect to not accidentally collectively press Alt+F4, given the increasingly higher stacks/larger powers involved.

[wahnfrieden]

No, I don’t mean to downplay - it was horrific and exploitative terror in both countries with terrible lasting effects. I just mentioned it because it’s less well known than what America did and because even Canadians might know what their country did to indigenous populations but not to its own citizens in this case (over 90% of Japanese in the country were sent to camps and most of them were Canadian citizens). Canadians sometimes forget the demonstrated capacity for their own country to do violence on its own people (not to downplay indigenous issues either of course, which are better understood), with a smugness about how much worse American government behaves.

[conception]

Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now.

First they came for…

[whattheheckheck]

What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?

[estearum]

Voting and getting everyone you know to vote

[JumpCrisscross]

And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds.

[p-e-w]

Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.

[estearum]

Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same.

Voting for the worse people makes things worse.

[rectang]

Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates.

RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate.

It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help.

ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is hard for SCOTUS to torpedo (though I suppose I shouldn't underestimate SCOTUS).

[gs17]

You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).

[intended]

I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler.

In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging.

You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.

[dgellow]

Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop

[SmirkingRevenge]

The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though.

And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it.

That really matters.

In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation.

(The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this)

Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-...

[deaux]

> Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high.

In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over.

There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up.

The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them.

The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here.

It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy.

Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.

[gs17]

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote.

Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive), it's at least not voting the most in your interests for the outcome. Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses.

But I agree with the rest of it, if none of the candidates represent you, the third-party vote at least allows you to send a signal of "I vote, but you need to make me want to vote for you, and this is what I want".

[zimpenfish]

> 2024 [...] the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term.

You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat candidate? Even though a swing of 115k votes would have handed the presidency to Harris instead?

It sounds like you have a particular issue with the 2016 and 2024 elections and I'm wondering if there's something in common that might explain it...

[mullingitover]

> Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it,

Ok I'll break it down for you.

> If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party

Parties cater to their bases, and putting yourself out there as an unreliable voting bloc is exactly how you get your demands ignored.

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb

It's not incredibly dumb, it's simple mathematical reality. This doesn't change unless the first past the post system changes. Why do you think the GOP backs the Green Party?

[dualvariable]

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate.

Tried that in 2000, voting for Nader as a protest vote against Clinton/Gore third way neoliberalism. I did that in a state where the electoral votes for Dems were 100% safe. Still just got blamed for Bush and there was zero self-reflection on the part of the Democratic Party.

...

I would urge everyone to stop fixating on the Presidential vote as the only fight to win and everything being win/lose based on that outcome. If the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House exceeds 50% of Democrats in the House, then we can start thinking about a world where e.g. AOC might be the speaker of the House rather than Nancy Pelosi.

> It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election.

Yeah, and the Office of the President is 4-8 years and is just more short-termism, along with individualism / cult of personality / CEO-leadership. If you want to make lasting change in the DNC, start by flipping more and more House seats to progressive from neoliberal.

[kgwxd]

> Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted

Because it's dumb. People don't want to hear dumb ideas, or take the time to try and convince someone that would spend however long it took to type that, apparently multiple times, without realizing it. Throwing away votes will never be the reasonable thing to do. I know you don't want to hear that, because it's too painful for you to admit there's no simple answer.

[amanaplanacanal]

You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't.

[rayiner]

Yes more people should vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).

[estearum]

Yes, more people should vote.

Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao.

As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public.

[rayiner]

High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent.

I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters.

I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.

[YeahThisIsMe]

The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.

[patrick451]

No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.

[JoshTriplett]

You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.)

If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting

Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)

In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.

(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)

[sosomoxie]

Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals.

[vjulian]

Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”.

Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.

[robotresearcher]

Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.

[LocalH]

We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations.

Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote

[specialist]

Not voting is much more insulting, by far.

Edit: "civic religion" aha. Sorry, I should have guessed you were trolling. Can't wait to see what kind of revolution you cook up.

[lovich]

Civil religions and in particular an American Civil religion, are a real thing[1]. Not sure if that’s what the guy meant however.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

[vjulian]

Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society.

[Sabinus]

Conversely, I think civics where anonymous people tell you voting isn't effective and promote a kind of resentful powerless nihilism is dangerous to society.

Reform is preferable to revolution which is preferable to oppression.

[esikich]

Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit.

[otikik]

Making the wealthy scared

[dmboyd]

The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat”

[jrflowers]

The other party needs to run better candidates. It’s their job to drive voter turnout in their favor (not internet argument warriors) and they’ve lost two out of the last three elections by sabotaging their own primaries and doing “Our candidate isn’t good but at least they’re not a got dang cheeto!!” campaigns.

“Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time.

[bobthepanda]

There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity.

The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party.

Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.

[Sabinus]

Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.

[bobthepanda]

I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider

* repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting

[bilbo0s]

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.

[giancarlostoro]

Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data.

[newZWhoDis]

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.

[falsemyrmidon]

You think they wouldn't use every tool available to then, including the census data?

[asdff]

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.

[awesomeMilou]

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.

[esseph]

> 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-...

[asdff]

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.

[esseph]

You act like anybody is actually following that.

[asdff]

Why would you keep your medicaid if you already have employee sponsored healthcare that comes out of your would be earnings?

[kgwxd]

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.

[ShinyLeftPad]

> 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

[asdff]

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.

[ShinyLeftPad]

my bank and cell provider and utility company don't ask for my race

anyway let's stop whatabouting:) we are talking about census

[willmadden]

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.

[everforward]

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 ..."

[bagels]

It's gray because people downvoted it.

[bagels]

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.

[FrustratedMonky]

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.

[smrtinsert]

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?

[cj]

Data mining companies?

Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.

[kajman]

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.

[esseph]

It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling.

https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h...

> Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses:

> Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers.

> The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court.

> Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.

[stackskipton]

I worked for Data company for a year. We absolutely used Census and ACS as baselines and checks. In fact, there was some talk about getting rid of ACS in Congress and we got emails about "EMAIL YOUR CONGRESSIONAL PERSON, DEMAND ACS STAY. Here are talking points."

[kajman]

I am indeed sworn to not reveal lots of data I knocked on doors for. My memory isn't that good, especially compared to the database it went into, anyway.

I hope it's not a baseline for individual records, but my assumption was that the census data would be pretty useful as a baseline for aggregate information, especially when it comes to comparing to private sets they're working with.

[SmirkingRevenge]

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

[SmirkingRevenge]

* ZoomInfo

[Dylan16807]

> 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.