An American Privacy Emergency
scottaaronson.blog
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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377 - June 2026 (604 comments)
scottaaronson.blog
Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377 - June 2026 (604 comments)
> DAO-216-26 bans differential privacy and other modern (and not so modern) techniques. It restricts disclosure avoidance techniques to “coarsening,”
> DAO-216-26 forbids “noise infusion”, described as “methods that involve modifying a dataset by adding random values, or noise.”
> By forbidding noise infusion, the directive bans the disclosure avoidance techniques at the core of dozens of data releases over the last three decades.
> Civil servants will do their best to comply with this order while still following the laws that require them to protect the confidentiality of respondents’ data. To balance these competing mandates, they may seek to produce less data or coarsen data so much that it is unusable. Or they might be pushed by political actors to publish data that can be easily unmasked...
This current administration is cursed.
I’m more surprised that they were able to look into it and come to the conclusion that they should get rid of it… What could be the logic here?
> People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts.
I think they are using any data source, private and public to compile enemy lists. We will see them use it to manipulate the mid term elections. Isnt it wise at this point to assume that extend of malignance and long term plannig?
So from its supporters own statements, because it makes it harder to identify non citizens in statistics.
Making it harder to identify non-citizens sounds like it’s easy to fit into the amorphous bucket of things they don’t like of “wokeness”.
The other thing to consider is the current administration has plenty of chaos and snap decisions at its top level but at its mid level and among its backers are plenty of people able to take a more long term view of what they want and how to get there.
Wouldn't be the first administrative action taken at a keyword-level of understanding.
This could have also been how the administration got convinced by someone with deeper understanding and specific goals.
both want to see the US government collapse.
a lot of people are going to have to go to jail, hang, or be exiled before anyone will take the US seriously again.
where are all of these chickenhawk 2nd amendment gun nuts now? they'll talk about FREEDOM while the house burns down around them.
I would love to see the more elegant techniques used, and also have the intuition that this is bad policy, but I don't see the "emergency" here. Labeling it as such just histrionic to me.
The serious danger is polarization and radicalization, turning people against each other, suppressing voices of reason. The ensuing chaos could help pull off another January 6th, only successful. Gerrymandering is one approach, but with more detailed data more interesting things may become possible.
they openly state why they want that data too in project 2025. take a guess...
You mean like by race, gender, and sexual orientation, and using statistical analysis to portray a group of oppressors vs. oppressed, perpetrators and victims? Exactly what was happening via official public policy for the last 4 years while the progressives cheered it on?
Please explain to us in great detail how exactly "official public policy" did that, including the laws and changes that were pushed to do so.
And explain why, if that were the case, conservatives are doing nothing to stop that.
Why would anyone continue to do something bad, just because the people you hate started it?
If you don't like what's happening now, I understand that point of view. But to pretend it didn't happen already is mind boggling.
If for some reason you don't think 2020-2024 were a social morass of slicing up people by their "identity", and in many cases were in fact made official public policy by way of signed executive orders (you can google them, I'm not your personal researcher), then I don't know what planet you were living on during that time.
So this is not about privacy. Scott sounds like a computer scientist forced (by the American ecosystem) to become a bombastic talker.
Was Differential Privacy specifically involved? I don't think so, but I think it's being lumped into the mix and being blamed for the other issues.
Also... the first census results typically come out in the same year, e.g. December 2020, not 2016? More detailed demographer data take a bit longer. COVID was really the cause for delayed releases.
As I said, it wasn't the disclosure avoidance that generated the most discrepancies. It was other forms of adjustments.
Do you have any source on that. For a census issue to have an actual impact in an election outcome, it must either be:
- a lucky issue (flipping a very close race from one side to the other)
- a very big issue
Both can happen occasionally, but I have a hard time imagining “many of them” occurring in the same election.
(2) By adding carefully tuned Gaussian noise. In the last 6 years we have also figured out how to add much less Gaussian noise: "The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08986
(3) This one is harder to answer, since the Census Bureau aimed to release the same style of statistics as in previous decades. So the goal of 2020 was to release the same statistics with the same error bounds. Evidence suggests they succeeded in doing this. "Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods" http://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07521, "Evaluating the Impacts of Swapping on the US Decennial Census" http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01320
It's too bad this has become political.
I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.
You mean legislation?
We do GDPR-compliant reporting by using differential privacy to provably remove PII.
It's sloppy use of language by someone who works in the sector.
And businesses wanting to be compliant with GDPR should not be misled with US PII terminology
Federally mandated parental leave (paternity and maternity leave) polls at about 80% in favor with the US adult population. This is regardless of political affiliation, by the way. Democrat and Republican voters both support it.
Upon reading this, you might be surprised as to why it's NOT federally mandated given how popular it is.
One group it's NOT popular with is corporations. And corporations donate a lot of money to politicians. And it's cheaper to donate to politicians who are against parental leave than it is to pay people for that parental leave.
I enjoy sharing this b/c it's a reminder that there are groups who spend a lot of time and money to get their way. At first, that might feel overwhelming. You might be surprised to know that when you call your local congressperson, those calls gets tallied b/c they want to know what their constituents care about. So give them a call and let them know.
Elected offices have become fiefdoms to enrich oneself and maintain the status quo. Anyone who bucks this trend has historically rarely gotten into office or been chased out once they do. This could be from funding another candidate, simply starving an existing candidate of campaign funds or in some cases by redistricting somebody out of a seat.
And look at the reelection rates for Congress [2]. They tend to hover between 90% and 95%.
[1]: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
[2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-ra...
Our politicians routinely sell out smaller issues for "downpayment in a coastal metro" level of money. It's just about within reach of a middle-class urban adult to directly fund with some personal sacrifices.
I feel like we like to imagine that these corporations are budgeting big-bucks to bribe/lobby politicians, because they have more money than most humans can actually mentally picture, but their budgets are often closer to a small team of software engineers' salary. Meta spend ~$25M on all lobbying last year - and they're the top corporate spender. That's under 1 hours of revenue for them.
It's important to remember that rights cannot be received, or bought. Privileges can. Equally easily privileges can be taken away again.
But rights can only be won in a fight.
Sadly, they also require a constant readiness to fight for keeping them; in civilized societies this happens in courtrooms, but escalations to the worse happen periodically.
you act like 1) ideology doesn't play in, and that 2) it's not a long-con situation; you give 60k now, but they're gonna expect 60k next election cycle.
and remember: if you can buy them now, someone else could by them with more money. see also that asshole from PA, J Fetterman
Are politicians really so beholden to an anonymous donor that makes a single $50k donation? Or even a single $500k one?
Or is it the real knowledge that said known regular donors will continue indefinitely as long as things go their way (and indefinitely support the opposition otherwise) …?
The pessimistic part of me wonders if a grassroots campaign that raised $10M would even be able drive any change with it.
50k USD is a an awful lot of money for a lower level politician to run an election campaign with.
Often times it is about the same amount, which means you cannot infer that the money influenced the vote.
Some do it right, but enough do not that unless you know you are getting the information from one of the ones who does it right you really need to check for yourself.
As they say, freedom ain’t free.
The executive branch is also available for relatively bargain basement prices!
Ask us about our unlimited pardoning power for federal offenses!
#Ad #WorldLibertyFinancial
If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.
This sounds like the sort of thing where if you poll people yes/no, a majority of people support it, but then if you ask them whether they'll change their vote over it, the people who said yes say it's not their most important issue and they don't care about it enough to do anything. Whereas the people who said no are e.g. small business owners if you don't exempt them from it because they can't afford to pay someone for extended time off while simultaneously paying someone else to fill in for them, or large business owners if you do exempt the small businesses because they hate anything that gives smaller companies a relative advantage, and both of them will actually care if you try to do it and oppose the policy either way for fear that it might get changed during or after being enacted.
So then you have 80% wants x 1% cares vs. 20% wants x 75% cares and the second number ends up being bigger.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-s1-5827039/supreme-court-c...
This line of thinking is exactly why America is sliding backwards.
It is not a problem to pay for things provide a net benefit to society.
Does free food help people? Most Americans are already overweight, and far, far more die every year from diseases of excess consumption than hunger/malnutrition. Furthermore, when you give them food stamps, they try to sell and defraud the program to buy drugs or alcohol.
We already “help” these people to the tune of many billions of dollars a year - let’s ask they make some cultural changes before we dive even deeper into debt as a nation.
Studies say yes.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8513528/
Your vibes and general lack of empathy don't make you correct.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homeles...
$50,000 a year per homeless with minimal, if any, result - if it's empathy, it's suicidal empathy to emit those kinds of funds without results year after year into systems that have sprung up to capture them and ask for more.
Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.
You think social democrats never heard of a balanced budget? I don't know how you "fiscal conservatives" take yourselves seriously.
40% of the population pays 0% in income taxes, often receiving credits and refunds.
I’m all for everyone contributing: one side looks like it’s contributing 40% already. How much more do you think should be taken from them to give to the people that currently contribute 0?
What's the top income tax bracket? Does it go up to Jeff Bezos levels or does it taper off quite a far amount below that?
How much do you value a stable society that doesn't promote mass death? What percentage of the wealthiest's income should we recognize comes from a world that is stable and peaceable because of opportunities for us all?
but lets be real, they pay shillbots
e.g. 50% or more internet traffic is now bot: https://cpl.thalesgroup.com/about-us/newsroom/2025-imperva-b...
The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.
So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.
Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.
Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.
As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.
[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
UHC requires the removal of politicians from qualified input, and this country's politicians love nothing more than to get overly involved in things they know nothing about.
Fact is people who spout this nonsense are simply selfish people with “F you, got mine” mindset. They hide their selfishness in garb and call others socialist.
pretty directly within the realms of what their candidates support, and they have a pretty good purity test to tell who to support or not with the genocide question
The true crisis here is in the captured political system.
In the 1990s in Australia a racist, white supremacist party arose called One Nation through a very weird confluence of events that led a racist fish and chip shop owner by the name of Pauline Hanson to become a member of parliament. It was almost 30 years ago she gave her now famous miaden speech to Parliament [2].
After some scandals, One Nation kind of disappeared for awhile, in part because the conservative coalition (of the Liberals and Nationals) basically adopted the racist platform in the early 2000s where asylum seekers were effectively scapegoated. But weirdly she's back now. Anyway, that part isn't the point.
Australia has a preferential voting system, what tends to be called ranked choice voting in the US. You generally have two options on how to vote: you can individually number candidates yourself or you can use the registered preferences for a given party. In this case you put a "1" in Australian Labor Party, Australian Greens or whatever. A lot of people do this so preferences matter. Anyway, One Nation had a strategy of voting gainst the incumbent with preferences. So if it was a Liberal seat, the preference went to Labor and vice versa. This scared the bejsus out of the political establishment such that the opposing political parties gave preferences to each other over One Nation, leading to One Nation getting no seats in Parliament despite getting 10%+ (at its original peak) of the popular vote.
My point here is that too many politicians and political parties view their seat as something that belongs to them. In the US primaries are treated largely as a formality by the parties for their anointed candidates. Re-election rates in Congress have sat at 95%+ for decades.
What's interesting is that the Demoratic Party is almost in open revolt currently and over the past few weeks, several long-term (10-30 years) incumbents have been primaried by insurgent candidates.
Here's a funf act I learned this week. It's been ~18 years since Citizens United basically got rid of campaign spending limits. A third of all the money spent since then has been spent this year on primaries. Thomas Massie has $35M+ spent against him in his primary, making it the most expensive in US history. Many others are in the millions. It's estimated that the total spending for the Senate seat in Maine will push $400M. For one Senate seat.
All of this is a long way of saying that the only thing that will work is making these legislators fear they'll lose their cushy positions. And really if somebody has sat in office for 30 years and has nothing really to show for it, it's time for them to go.
I was cynical at first like you, thinking why bother. But when I tried it, turned out I was wrong and I actually had a pretty good experience!
The way I see it now, is that MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts, so when you get in touch and tell them what you think.. you're actually giving them a huge gift.
It can actually be pretty effective, especially for state/local issues. For federal stuff, sure, might not be as good, but you'll at least get some satisfaction from getting an acknowledgement from their chief of staff or secretary.
Yes, contacting your MP and senators can be very useful, including for federal stuff.
It's harder to actually get meetings with Federal members (they spend a lot of time in Canberra) but still worth trying.
Also it is very effective to vote for independent senators. You need to pay careful attention to make sure they aren't secretly insane but senators like David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie are very effective (Lambie seems crazy sometimes but she is surprisingly willing to change her mind on issues).
Pocock is a blight on the senate. The guy is just a seppo complaint repeating station. I swear he is more in touch with the democrat party than any Australian.
Its done exactly squat.
>MPs aren't always in a good position to get close to the facts,
Pocock was repeating data centre noise concerns, but refuses to simply hold a press conference on the street outside of his local to demonstrate them. Facts are not desirable for parliamentarians, they routinely get in the way of business.
more urgent is to repair the broken election process especially in california where it now takes 30+ days to "count" the votes.
The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...
1 https://apnews.com/article/2020-census-bureau-redistricting-...
[1]: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi...