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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

How hard have you thought about this?

The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions.

A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home.

If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible.

Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

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> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.

Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.

>And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.

There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.

The last thing people should support is creating of profiles of individuals by combining data from different government agencies. This is why the census is so important as a data collection mechanism.

> There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets.

This is an excellent point. In my opinion, such laws are a good idea. Most of the time, policy decisions should not require IRS data. (Or other personal data.)

But to get around such laws, the government asks citizens to provide that data a second time (in the census). And sometimes it's asked yet again on other forms. This seems to defeat the purpose of those laws.

I can see that federal disaster aid might need to know if some area needs more or less aid, depending on the wealth of the area receiving aid. If aid is given to individuals, the have a need to know the individuals' income.

When there is a reasonable need to know, I would prefer the government use the much more accurate IRS data, rather than ask for people's income multiple times. The laws preventing merging federal datasets could be rethought, given what is now known about preserving privacy mathematically. I would like to see specific exemptions made, with the provided data properly anonymized to preserve privacy while serving the legitimate purpose for which the data was requested. The use of such data should require a request to congress for it.

The census doesn't collect party affiliations.

https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting/about/faq...

> the CPS Voting and Registration Supplement does not ask any questions of a partisan nature.

This seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.

I don't think the question "Has this person given birth to any children in the past 12 months?" would look good on a tax return.

My home country pays a baby bonus to people and it's administered via the tax system, so I think we ask something very similar actually.

Have you filled out a federal income tax return in the US?

It absolutely asks for the names (and SSN) of any dependents. It's trivial to infer whether one of the adult(s) filing the tax return gave birth in the last 12 months based on the last 2 years of tax returns for those adult(s).

Isn't that already on the tax return? Your dependent count would increment from the prior year. The IRS can also distinguish births vs adoptions and step children by the checking for novel SSNs.

> tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.

Plenty of people don’t file tax returns (legally even, there’s a minimum income threshold).

The census isn't for helping the country make any decisions other than determining the number of representatives and apportionment of taxes. It should not be collecting any data that isn't necessary for that.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-2...

> The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

The key thing you're missing is "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct".

Congress has passed a whole bunch of laws that attach additional responsibilities to the census for the purpose of supporting government decisions.

The Permanent Census Office Act of 1902 for example, which established the census office and tacked on "an annual survey of cotton production, and other economic censuses" https://www.census.gov/about/history/historical-censuses-and...

That's not true, they also wanted to get an understanding of who they were governing.

I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though.

I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.

They didn't stop publishing census data. Its publication is delayed for approximately one human lifetime, to avoid affecting the living:

https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2022/01/20/census-record...

They haven't stopped but they don't happen immediately.

Detailed census records are published 72 years after they were collected; the last release (of 1950 census data) came out in 2022; the next one should be published in 2032.

See: https://www.archives.gov/research/census

The Census Bureau is a lot more than the 10-year Census, and it already makes very extensive use of IRS data and other administrative sources. Virtually everything that is published using these sources uses either differential privacy or other privacy protection methods that are prohibited by the order. I'm guessing that a lot of those pieces of data are just going to be put on hold until the order is reversed or weakened. A number of things might have to go away permanently, as there's almost certainly no way to protect privacy in them without some kind of noise infusion.

TBH I don't think the people who wrote this knew how much collateral impact it would have.

>Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.

That seems to me like it's a good thing. Allow people to determine whether the data is actually needed, rather than closing their eyes.

Thank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting

This is the real reason for the fudging of the data. People don't want an ethnicity/citizenship status/birth country breakdown of things like benefit use.

Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.

> Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced?

As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

They can certainly enforce that you answer the survey. But it's very difficult to enforce a requirement that people answer questions accurately, particularly when they perceive that doing so will expose them to danger.

I don't get what danger is being referenced here that exists only if the data is released to the public (in aggregate)?

The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.

There's not many cases of enforcement. Non-response is taken about as seriously as the Robinson–Patman act. I think the Census Bureau is very reliant on people thinking there will be enforcement, however, which is why the materials they send all have a threatening aura. I don't know about the ACS, but for the decennial census I often felt like my job as an enumerator was just to bother people until they'd answer. The case would keep being recycled until we got at least (IIRC) a head count.

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