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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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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.
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
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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.