US Census Bureau Offers Public API For Data Apps

Nerval's Lobster writes "For any software developers with an urge to play around with demographic or socio-economic data: the U.S. Census Bureau has launched an API for Web and mobile apps that can slice that statistical information in all sorts of nifty ways. The API draws data from two sets: the 2010 Census (statistics include population, age, sex, and race) and the 2006-2010 American Community Survey (offers information on education, income, occupation, commuting, and more). In theory, developers could use those datasets to analyze housing prices for a particular neighborhood, or gain insights into a city's employment cycles. The APIs include no information that could identify an individual."

Comments

political power advantage

[fluffythedestroyer]

the gov can use this data for themselves in the campaign. With demograph info you can finally manage your campain more effectively.

Re:political power advantage

[fiannaFailMan]

yes but terrorists can use this type of information to locate populations centers and high value targets

You know what? Let's camouflage our cities in case the Jihadists find out where people live.

FFS.

Either there's a joke that I'm not getting or some people are sad sad individuals who see terrorists under every bed. It's like when that tall viaduct was built in France people here were posting "b ... b ... but won't terrorists want to blow it up?" It was the same every time something big or tall was built. You know what I say? Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourselves.

You'd think terrorism was invented in 2001 to listen to some people. What do you think the rest of the world has been putting up with for decades? The Brits were having their town and city centres blown to pieces long before most USAians even heard of terrorism. But you know what? They didn't let it govern their lives. They carried on shopping in their town and city centres. They carried on building tall buildings out of glass. They carried on riding on trains at 110MPH. They carried on cramming into crowded buses and underground train systems. They didn't become a crowd of pathetic little scaredycats who lock themselves in the room and didn't move for fear that the terrorists would get them. Sure they took a few precautions (like stopping the left luggage service in train stations and removing trash cans from airports) but they didn't become paranoid neurotic wrecks.

Re:political power advantage

[vlm]

OK how about commentary on this accurate part:

become paranoid neurotic wrecks.

Re:political power advantage

[gknoy]

Any terrorist that has to use the US Census Bureau to find a population center, as opposed to buying a map from AAA or using Wikipedia, is an idiot.

Re:Riiiiight

[vlm]

For those who don't get it,

(statistics include population, age, sex, and race)

(offers information on education, income, occupation, commuting, and more).

Treat is as a multidimensional data source. So you figure out who someone is using perhaps 6 factors, then you've got the unknown data for the other 1315 data points.

I almost got in quite a bit of trouble at a previous employer by pointing out a public distributed incredibly detailed analysis of an "anonymous" corporate employee attitude survey mean it was completely 100% non anonymous. So... 100% of 25 year old engineers who are white single males who drive a red car and have an Irish girlfriend and live in an apartment and commute to work between 4 and 8 miles and have a five digit /. UID responded that their boss was a 5/10 at leadership, or whatever. Sure... that's perfectly anonymous.

It wasn't quite that ridiculous but pretty darn close. As I recall they "de-anonymized" it by providing 5 year age brackets and 1 year (yikes) hiring date brackets, and job titles. It was enough to quite sufficient to identify the exact responses of each person. The funny part was once the word got out employees would read the responses of other people... oh so Rachel in purchasing said that her boss was a complete... You get the idea.

Frankly I was more insulted that they thought we were stupid enough not to understand they were lying despite giving us complete evidence, than I was insulted that they lied to us by calling it anonymous. They had no shortage of suckiness.

They were even stupid enough to pretend it was anonymous and run it year after year, at least until I left. Needless to say everyone lied like a carpet after the first debacle.

Re:Riiiiight

[FranTaylor]

census data has been public all along

before now you had to go to washington and look it up yourself

now it's easier to get at

Re:Riiiiight

[FranTaylor]

all of this data has always been available to those who ask for it

they have just made it easier for people to get at it

what is your complaint again?

Re:Riiiiight

[uniquename72]

census data has been public all along

before now you had to go to washington and look it up yourself

now it's easier to get at

No, it's been online for years. There just hasn't been a good, uniform way to query it and write apps against it.

That's not how it works

[langelgjm]

That's not how Census information is either collected or stored. First off, there are two different data sources at issue - the decennial census, which gathers a very limited set of information on (theoretically) every person in the country, and the American Community Survey, which uses sampling to get estimates on a much wider range of information. You cannot link those two datasets, since the only public factors they share are far too broad - e.g., age, race, sex, etc., and the time periods during which they are conducted are totally different.

Besides, the information is not released at person-level. The lowest level you can get sampled information at (e.g., the detailed ACS stuff) is the "block group", which on average contains 39 blocks. You can get decennial census information at the block level, and a "block" may correspond to a city block, or a much larger area for lesser-populated areas.

So, you can find some interesting information about your city street (I've looked up my own, and found the number of people living alone, owning/renting, age, sex, etc. for the 24 houses on my block), but these data are not per person, they are per block - in other words, if there is only one Native American living on my street, I cannot then find out whether they are owning/renting. I can only find out the number of renters on the entire block.

Re:That's not how it works

[killmenow]

Have you seen this?

Not really...

[langelgjm]

I don't know what specifically you tried to do, but there is a lot of data available down to the block group and block level, which are relatively small geographic units. There's even more data available by "place", which would include any major city and many smaller cities and towns. Some of the tax data is redacted for confidentiality (e.g., when there is only one employer of a certain type in a geographic area, they won't release payroll information for it), but that's pretty unusual in larger areas.

You may have been using one of the user-friendly tools, which can be limited in their reach. American FactFinder has more depth than most, but it's also kind of a PITA. If you're serious about digging into the data, you can download zipped text files that represent the full extent of the public information available, which you can then load into your favorite processing program.