I'm thinking about going in the opposite direction, and broadcasting all of my personally identifying information (credit card, SSN, etc). Obviously I would have to set aside a large amount of time to deal with issuing fraud reports, and make sure that I wasn't risking anything that I can't afford to lose--but it does seem simpler in some ways.
After all, if you don't have anything to hide, you're bulletproof, right?
Your browser history or credit card statements for porn sites may not be illegal, but might hamper your political career or personal life.
You may be the CEO of a non-profit aiming to combat fossil fuels in which case your youth spent tractor pulling or drag racing may prove "annoying" once a adversary succeeds in spinning the history right.
There are lots of examples where nothing to hide has absolutely nothing to do with the law. And the big deal here is that YOU decide for yourself what your conscience can commit to - not public debate.
In France in particular there is the example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Carmille René Carmille, who was in charge of census and actively sabotaged the collection and use of data.
See also http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-his... which calls Carmille one of the first hackers:
"After the invasion, the pro-Nazi Vichy government ordered a nationwide census. Carmille requested the assignment of compiling data from the census forms onto tabulator cards for analysis. His group transferred the data, including information from Column 11—where citizens were asked to indicate their religion—onto tabulator cards. They were instructed by the Nazis to sort the cards and print a list of all Jews living in France so that they could be located and sent to concentration camps.
Over the course of two years, Carmille and his group purposely delayed the process by mishandling the punch cards. He also hacked his own machines, reprogramming them so that they’d never punch information from Column 11 onto any census card. Instead, Carmille’s groups spent most of their time using the information on the cards to find and recruit former French soldiers for the French Resistance."
If that's not hacking and data protection, then I don't know what is.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-c...
Might be worth noting that children that were in these camps are still alive today.
You don't need to weigh things against extermination explicitly, just any bad consequence, including political ones.
To all individuals equally? weighed against individual risk?
- generic wealth level - generic education level - living in a particular area of the country - disabilities - having small children
You could probably find more examples like those if you browse the history of humanity. The point is, you can be targeted over anything, and you can't predict what it will be in advance. The Nazis exterminated members of religious minorities and different sexual orientation, which was somewhat unusual in history. The Soviets killed people with high educational credentials and with lots of wealth. Who knows what the next evil empire will pick as an excuse to murder people?
You can't run a society on the assumption it's doomed and everyone will get massacred. That some particular demographical data will be used to select and murder people is a low-probability hypothetical. That it is useful for managing a country right now is a fact. I get one not wanting to be oversharing about oneself, but I don't think that a remote possibility that a piece of demographic data will be used for evil purposes is grounds for ditching censuses altogether. This is not something we should be paranoid about.
Finding yourself questioned, monitored, surveilled, on any kind of "list" (no-fly, hollywood-black) or at any kind of increased risk or action by any actor, state or otherwise, is a risk to be weighed against whatever gain you might make from accurate stats.
> Who knows what the next evil empire will pick as an excuse to murder people?
An argument for giving up less discriminating information in general.
> You can't run a society on the assumption it's doomed and everyone will get massacred.
Much of the US constitution seems centered on protecting the people from an overly powerful government, and restricting said power. Make this sentence less hyperbolic, and you can run a society based on certain assumptions of corruption and abuse.
e.g. A gay Russian who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004. Before LJ is bought by a russian company and russia becomes more homophobic.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide
It's cropped up on HN before.
And that better sentence busts open the assumption :)
Shouldn't a service like this exist?
Maybe it would go into comment threads, Google the title, and post a blurb paragraph from a top result? Use karma and elastic search to machine learn which sites and topics to post?
It might even respond to questions with the specific random data for that site from when it signed up, to keep it consistent.