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

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.

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.