Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

whatever1

We can make them more accurate by leveraging ICE going door to door.

Pragmata

Frankly i see no reason to keep this data private. They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc... Fundamentally this is public data. If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is. There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is simply not one of those things. publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.

abletonlive

There will be a bunch of people that start off with the premise that this data should be private and make following arguments based on this premise. So I'll just go ahead and ask, give me good reasons why this data should be private? My guess is that most of you think we should be counting illegals because they should have representation. And I reject that

delichon

The dueling political demands of accuracy and privacy are simply incompatible at some level. After reading this, maybe Hanlon's Razor isn't the right standard. Besides malice and stupidity, there is impossibility. Some problems just aren't solvable under certain constraints. I don't envy the statisticians tasked with finding a politically palatable solution to a math problem.

xenophonf

This is a gift to reactionary gerrymandering and voting restriction efforts, along with things like yesterday's FBI raid of an Ohio voting rights organization. https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohi... Representative Joyce Beatty is from Ohio and was instrumental in stopping Trump from illegally renaming the Kennedy Center. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-b...

tbrownaw

> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. Maybe banning it is a way of pretending that the problem doesn't exist, in the hope that it will go away? Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.

asolove

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way. It’s a census: it just asks questions. If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

jmole

Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise. I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined". Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.

wnc3141

Stalin's demographic researchers kept disappearing until they came up with the numbers he wanted.

watersb

The better to sell the data, all your privates are belong to us.

MinimalAction

Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment. Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.

Kim_Bruning

Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble. "What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .

lokar

Can anyone share how other countries handle this?

foolfoolz

i have such a hard time reconciling stuff like this: > The census bureau decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census and: > The consequences will be dire for utility or for privacy, and possibly both. It's hard to understate this point: future statistical releases will either be useless compared to past ones, or they will be incredibly unsafe so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.” and for the last census only we added some privacy items. but if we remove just one of those filters, we are in “dire” circumstances? but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this. this makes it feel like an emotional overblown problem

arjie

Pretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure. I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise. I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse. We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.

Kim_Bruning

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-d...

ProllyInfamous

The fines for non-compliance are low enough to remain silent. Do. The American Census Survey (randomly-selected long-form questionairre) is dangerously overinvasive.

iugtmkbdfil834

Can anyone explain to me the previous state and why it was desirable? I admittedly do not understand why people are getting riled up. I am not being difficult. I really don't understand the original state and the changed state here.

ck2

if you want to keep your sanity, I suggest silently adding the phrase "...for the next 950 days" every time you read some politically spiteful news like this because the next two years are going to become insanely miserable

thih9

I guess this could be implemented externally. Eg via some app that instructs respondents to enter a specific answer in a pseudorandomly chosen question. Of course security would be another question.