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Did You Do the Long Form?
mliu sent in: "An interesting article about how with modern methods it could be theoretically possible to link census data back to a person and the steps the Census Bureau is taking to prevent this." The marketers know so much now that even the general data the Census Bureau releases could possibly be linked up with Credit Bureau data... ouch.
Couldn't the FBI concievably get much much more information about you than could be revealed on a Census form, through, say, Carnivore, illegal wiretapping, and other agencies through Echelon?
The Short Form asks only about number of people living in the house, their names, ages, relationship to head of house, and for some bizarre reason, if they are Hispanic or not. Not to be too politically incorrect, but when I was a Census taker in 1980, minorities constituted the overwhelming bulk of my 'mop-up' efforts, and like as not they would not reveal a thing to me when I asked them those simple questions. Some kicked me off of their property, refusing even the most basic questions ('do you live here?'). I think they trust their government less than white folk, at least in this instance.
But now, in part thanks to the internet, what the US Census can collect on an Individual is much less than what a corp can get simply by asking.
The Long Form is fillied with innocuous questions like how long it takes to get to work and if you can speak a different language. Even though they ask how much you make and how much your property is worth, that's not a whole lot different than the questionnaires you routinely get from, say, Yahoo! or Amazon.
What the government Does do better than the corps is survey Each and Every household in the country, creating a valuable aggregated dataset that shows demographics and such. But they publish this information and make it available as a govt service.
So I really don't see any need to panic here. In fact, the article is not about what it says its about. If you read the whole article you discover that the intro is just a hook: it's not about them giving your data to a corp, its about them blurring individual stats to Preserve the integrity of individuals.
The govt is very concerned that citizens will not perform their constitutional duty to be enumerated. They are scared enough to blur their own stats. Isn't this good news for the paranoid?
Hell, the paranoid didn't fill out their form anyway...
But we are talking about the long form, here
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I guess you don't complain about badly planned roads or government services then. After all, it takes a lot of information to get these things right - without the census how is anyone going to know how to find the best location for new high schools or the best transport option for a town?
I admit having a fine for not filling in this info is ridiculous, but is avoiding the risk of someone sending you junk mail worth the extra cost of bad government planning? You may also think some of the questions are too nosey and perhaps they are for you. However, some areas may appreciate having translated materials at the local government offices in the native languages of local populations.
I can see the justification for the paranoia of some US citizens against their government. However, censuses (censii?) do have a worthwhile purpose and you may be disadvantaging your community by not participating.
This is a bit of a distortion. The phrase "actual Enumeration" is part of the sentence:
IOW, the "actual Enumeration" refers to the process of taking the Census, and does not mean that only a direct counting of individuals is allowable. IMO the recent Supreme Court ruling to the contrary was exactly the same kind of political decision that resulted in us getting our current president. That said, the Constitution says that the Census must be performed in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, but it does not exclude its use for other purposes. In fact, it says that it is to be carried out as Congress directs, so Congress clearly has the right to design the Census as it sees fit.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
So, if I give you my zip code, day of birth, and age, there is a good chance that you can identify me uniquely based on publically accessible records. Any additional information, like income level, first name, hobbies, years of residence in this zip code, marital status, gender, etc. makes such identifications very reliable.
There isn't a lot of anonymity, either off-line or on-line.
There's a similar thing happend in Britain where a company has published "UK-Info Disk", they basically take all the divergent and distributed information from electoral roles, land registry, tax registration, private marketing databases, phone books and then combine and link all the information together on Ordinent Survey maps, so basically you have find out huge amounts of information from a simple postcode (zip).
There's also cracks of the program that let you back trace the database and do any number of reverse lookups (criminals find this especially useful). It seems the developers purposely put these weaknesses into the product as hidden features.
Because the data is legally obtained in the UK then sent to the Caymen Isles or processing it basically circumvents all the British Data Protection and Freedom of Information Laws.
The Info Disk company have spun off 192.com which offers similar services, ironically they advertise the "The Big Breach" book from a former MI6 officer on their front-page, a book which is somewhat forbidden in the UK... however 192.com are hardly champions of free-speech when you delve into the infringing and questionable practices they use.
But it should make you a little queasy. That meta-self that runs your life has been out there since the first person started collecting data. It isn't YOU that walks into a bank and asks for a loan. It isn't your suit that gets you that loan.
John Q. Banker smiles at the physical YOU and then goes and finds out about your meta-self. This person has much more clout in the world than you ever will. This person is your credit rating, your pay stubs, etc. That person means so much more.
And now the census. A huge compilation of data. The pot of gold at the end of the advertising/data mining rainbow. Of COURSE they will find a way to use it. It is just to valuable to the open market. This is an advertisers dream. Targeted information on a broad scale down to the very last detail.
And so the real question here lies in not whether the motivations are just for doing this. We made this situation by having a free market system. The question is what the census will do to protect that data, or how they will re-work their questions to protect the individual. Otherwise, there will be a huge resistance to ever filling out a census form again.
THAT would be a shame, because the census really does some good for people, as big and lumbering as it is.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
When the census polls me, I tell them:
"There are people of voting age residing here. There are people who will be of voting age by the next census."
That's all they're constitutionally entitled to know. (Actually, it's even more than they're entitled to know. The first half is sufficient.)
They try to make it SOUND like you have to answer all the rest of the questions or face a fine. You don't.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Those are the ones that you have zero control over. Some #$%^@ accidentally put it into a shared medical database tha tI have AIDS. Now I can't get insurance. Banks won't give me loans nor credit cards. I have tests proving I don't have AIDS yet I cannot cleanse this false information because there is no way I can even know every medical data warehouse that has the info. It's like it's it's been posted to USENET. I send cancel messages but the original post still manages to live on all over the place.
The Census Bureau says it's your civic duty to answer these snooping questions. In reality, it's your patriotic duty to refuse to answer. You can strike a blow for privacy, equality, and liberty by declining to answer every question on the Census form except the one required by the Constitution: How many people live in your home?
The U.S. Constitution says the purpose of the Census is to make an "actual enumeration." That is, to take an accurate count of Americans for the purpose of apportioning congressional districts. But the federal government has gone far beyond that mandate. The long version of the Census -- which one in every six households will receive -- contains a whopping 52 questions. That's 51 more than the Constitution requires. Maybe that's why compliance with the Census had plummeted to just 65% by 1990.
Unfortunately, the government has ways of making you talk. Title 13, Chapter 7 of the U.S. code mandates a $100 fine for those who decline to answer Census questions. What kind of government demands, under penalty of law, reams of personal data -- including racial characteristics -- from its citizens? Ours does. That's why it's time for some polite, patriotic civil disobedience. If you care about privacy, genuine equality, and old-fashioned American liberty, the arrival of the Census form is your chance to literally stand up and be counted.
Tell them how many people live in your home, and that's all. Maybe $100 is a small price to pay for making a principled stand for privacy and freedom.
-snellac
Correlating information used to be hard, back when computers were big and expensive - businesses could still do it, but it had to be financially worthwhile to dedicate time from that 10-MIPS multi-megabuck mainframe which had two megs of memory, 250MB DASD, and a tape drive. That machine now fits in your pocket, and your desktop machine can do amazing queries with free data from the internet and cheap mapping programs - any data that's been collected can pretty much be correlated with anything else, and the only way to prevent that is not to collect it in the first place.
Remember that the laws protecting privacy of census data aren't graven in stone - they apply only until Congress feels like changing them because they've got some political goal or other. And the US military got access to census data in the 40s to use it for arresting Japanese-Americans because of their race - in spite of the 2000 Census bragging about how nobody's violated their privacy in 50 years, which is since 1950, after the war was over....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One application of the famous min cut/max flow algorithm in graph theory (wooo!) is to consistently round matrix entries. i.e. (tricky definition) The rows sums and column sums of the rounded elements in the matrix are equal to the rounded row and column sums of the unaltered elements of the matrix.
I hear you asking. Who cares?
One application of this sort of matrix rounding is
publishing confidential survey data. Rounding can disguise the data, so that it is not traceable to any particular individual.
The reference below describes that the class of matrix rounding problems is equivalent to the flow problem in certain capacitated network flow models. Feasible flows can be found using the 'min cut/max flow' algorithm. The author proves that there is always a feasible solution for a subclass where marginal totals are uniformly confined.
reference:
Management Science, Vol. 12, No. 9, May 1966
Bacharach, Michael. "Matrix Rounding Problems"
since it is an old reference, I will attempt to convey the setup. The network is constructed as follows:
The matrix to round, A, has individual entries, A(ij) arranged in rows and columns...
Make a set X, consisting of a node, i, for each row in the matrix. Make a set Y consisting of a node, j, for each column in the matrix.
Add an arc (i,j) representing each matrix entry A(ij). (Note X union Y is a bipartite graph)
Add a source node s and attach it to each element in X, and a sink node t and attach it to each element in Y, the resulting arcs (s,i) represent each row sum and arcs (j,t) each column sum. The lower and upper bounds for all arcs should correspond to the lower and upper rounding limits of the original matrix entry, or the rounding limits for each row/column sum as appropriate.
Any feasible (integer) flow from s to t, will correspond to an acceptable (integer) rounding of values. (And a maximum flow will give us a feasible flow.)
The above should be modded up even higher than it is. As much as I hate government regulation, the credit/medical/rejection database industry needs to be regulated with the kind of scrutiny we only wish the nuclear power industry was regulated with.
A goverment agency or administrative court needs to have the power to issue "cancel" requests for this kind of thing. Any database vendor found to be carrying the "cancled" information after 90 days should be fined $100k per incident, payable to the person listed, and forced to remove the data with 7 days or face another $100k fine, with an injunction to follow that the data be removed THAT DAY and if found the next day, fined $500k and barred from buying, selling or collecting information until the error is corrected. All databases carrying medical, credit or other information use to deny, limit or otherwise screen access to credit, medical or insurance services should be required to be run against the "cancel" database every year and ALWAYS before being sold AND after being bought before they may be used as a screening tool.
It's too easy for the rejection industry (banks, medical, insurance, et al) to get bad data into their systems and not take it out or somehow keep reintroducing it (usually by swapping data with their fellow purveyors of rejection data). The USENET analogy is perfect.
there's an article in the current issue of 2600 on how to get anybody's credit information.
:) )
Basically the method is:
1. Get a MasterCard/Visa application, whatever.
2. Enter the target's current address into the "Previous Address" section on the application.
3. Enter your address (or the dropsite address) in the "Current Address" section.
4. Enter their name and birthday in the information section.
5. Leave the rest of the application blank. (You don't want the application accepted, and if it's accepted you'll be in a shitload of trouble.
6. The agency will match the person with their name and the "previous address" but because no income information is mentioned they'll reject the application.
7. By law, the agency is required to send a notice of rejection to you., which will have the person's social security number on it.
And once you have a social security number, you're set: Go get a driver's license, and you're a new man (or woman, if that's they way you swing
Discalaimer: This is provided for informational purposes only, I do not condone any misuse of such information...yada yada