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Did You Do the Long Form? 126

Posted by michael from the SELECT-*-FROM-census-INNER-JOIN-creditbureau dept.
mliu sent in: "An interesting article about how with modern methods it could be theoretically possible to link census data back to a person and the steps the Census Bureau is taking to prevent this." The marketers know so much now that even the general data the Census Bureau releases could possibly be linked up with Credit Bureau data... ouch.
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Did You Do the Long Form? More

Did You Do the Long Form?

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  • >It's comprable (kinda.. sorta..) to targeted advertising on television

    Less so than more. The cable company does not keep records that say "Citizen C. watches the sports channel 3 hours a day." The cable company cannot associate Citizen C. with the audience of a particular channel. And the cable company doesn't keep a SportsChannelViewers.xls or sell it off to ESPN Magazine for promo mailings. What you watch on TV is your business (assuming you don't have a Nielsen box and don't order pay-per-view movies) and nobody knows that information.

    I agree, though, I don't want people knowing information about me unless I supply that information myself. There are ways to go about this - I've done a decent job of it, with ZERO junk postal mail or phone calls at my apartment in a year and a half - but I'm leery of the Census. Nobody needs to know the sort of things that they want to know about everyone.

    Shaun
  • That was probably one of the best simpsons episodes, but anyways 10 bucks says there is some body out there trying to match satelite pictures to people. Probably because they have nothing better to do.

    C:\
    C:\Dos
    C:\dos\run

  • Who Knows More about You? (Score:4)

    by Bluesee ( 173416 ) <michaelpatrickkenny.yahoo@com> on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @05:07PM (#431271)
    Couldn't the FBI concievably get much much more information about you than could be revealed on a Census form, through, say, Carnivore, illegal wiretapping, and other agencies through Echelon?

    The Short Form asks only about number of people living in the house, their names, ages, relationship to head of house, and for some bizarre reason, if they are Hispanic or not. Not to be too politically incorrect, but when I was a Census taker in 1980, minorities constituted the overwhelming bulk of my 'mop-up' efforts, and like as not they would not reveal a thing to me when I asked them those simple questions. Some kicked me off of their property, refusing even the most basic questions ('do you live here?'). I think they trust their government less than white folk, at least in this instance.

    But now, in part thanks to the internet, what the US Census can collect on an Individual is much less than what a corp can get simply by asking.

    The Long Form is fillied with innocuous questions like how long it takes to get to work and if you can speak a different language. Even though they ask how much you make and how much your property is worth, that's not a whole lot different than the questionnaires you routinely get from, say, Yahoo! or Amazon.

    What the government Does do better than the corps is survey Each and Every household in the country, creating a valuable aggregated dataset that shows demographics and such. But they publish this information and make it available as a govt service.

    So I really don't see any need to panic here. In fact, the article is not about what it says its about. If you read the whole article you discover that the intro is just a hook: it's not about them giving your data to a corp, its about them blurring individual stats to Preserve the integrity of individuals.

    The govt is very concerned that citizens will not perform their constitutional duty to be enumerated. They are scared enough to blur their own stats. Isn't this good news for the paranoid?

    Hell, the paranoid didn't fill out their form anyway...

    But we are talking about the long form, here
  • Well atleast now we know why the paranoid people didn't fill out their census forms.

  • Re:As per the Census (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's in the Constitution, even, that the government hold a Census. Refusing to cooperate in the Census is actually 'unconstitutional', rather than illegal.

    No, the Constitution states that the Government must make an enumeration - it says nothing about citizens cooperating with it.

    The constitution is a document that describes what the Governement can and can't do, not the individual. There has only been one exception to this rule, and it was eventually overturned. (Prohibition, for the slow out there.)

    Now, it's implied by the Constitution that the US Federal govenment can make laws to help it carry out it's duty. Those laws can then make it illegal to not comply with the census, but there is nothing in the Constitution stating that citizens must cooperate with the census.

  • ...and they want to drop [census.gov] the "actual enumeration" bit, too. They're not allowed [census.gov] to make up numbers for redistricting purposes this time; next time...
  • From the article: "The re-identification process is highly complex and doesn't have a high yield: In a Census Bureau test, only 10 percent of survey participants could be re-identified.

    Only 10 percent? Well, considering that the US has about 275 million [odci.gov] citizens, I can sleep easier at night knowing that only 27 million of these can be re-identified.

    Identifies well with others. The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]

  • Re:Protect your privacy: Only answer question #1 (Score:3)

    by Alpha State ( 89105 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @06:09PM (#431276) Homepage

    I guess you don't complain about badly planned roads or government services then. After all, it takes a lot of information to get these things right - without the census how is anyone going to know how to find the best location for new high schools or the best transport option for a town?

    I admit having a fine for not filling in this info is ridiculous, but is avoiding the risk of someone sending you junk mail worth the extra cost of bad government planning? You may also think some of the questions are too nosey and perhaps they are for you. However, some areas may appreciate having translated materials at the local government offices in the native languages of local populations.

    I can see the justification for the paranoia of some US citizens against their government. However, censuses (censii?) do have a worthwhile purpose and you may be disadvantaging your community by not participating.

  • "I think many people feel they could probably obtain information easier from some other source than trying to obtain it from a census file."

    When there are easier ways and more authentic data available, why would the marketeers bother? Imagine the effect they are going to have when they contact the guy who actually earns a $1000 but his data was blurred and so it now shows $5000.

    Lets be aware and alert not paranoid.

  • credit card applications require your social security number to be put on the app in the first place

    They provide a place for your SSN, but it is illegle for anyone but the social security or IRS to actually REQUIRE it. There is a several hundered or thousand dollar penalty for requiring it. You are NOT required to disclose that information to anyone but a few government agencies.

    I forget the particular section of the US code that defines this, but I've read it, its easy to find.

  • ...know even more, probably. They see not just a once-every-ten-years survey, but they know everywhere you shop (credit card) or every product you buy (supermarket -- that's what they use those "preferred shopper" discount cards for). Think of ten years of purchase records. You could probably figure out everything that goes on in a household. I don't know what you would get from being able to predict menstrual cycles of soccer moms in medium-to-large sized suburbs, but someone would find a way to exploit that info for $$$.
    -----------
  • The U.S. Constitution says the purpose of the Census is to make an "actual enumeration."

    This is a bit of a distortion. The phrase "actual Enumeration" is part of the sentence:

    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.

    IOW, the "actual Enumeration" refers to the process of taking the Census, and does not mean that only a direct counting of individuals is allowable. IMO the recent Supreme Court ruling to the contrary was exactly the same kind of political decision that resulted in us getting our current president. That said, the Constitution says that the Census must be performed in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, but it does not exclude its use for other purposes. In fact, it says that it is to be carried out as Congress directs, so Congress clearly has the right to design the Census as it sees fit.

  • The way that worked was to go to neighbors and get the information. Often times that was sufficient to get what was needed. I found myself having to do that to get Census information on someone, most of the time because they worked odd hours, so we performed a proxy interview because of negative contacts.

    Theoretically, the civil fine for not answering questions is $100 per question refused. Criminal refusal can be punished by a fine up to $500 per question, although the Census Bureau only has sought criminal convictions twice.

    One of the convictions is U.S. v. Rickenbacker from 1960 or 1961, appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the conviction was upheld.

    Folks forget that it is constitutional for Congress to pass laws (13 USC 1 et seq.) which regulate the Census, just as an "actual enumeration" is required; the courts consistently uphold this.

    Tell Congressfolks like the libertarian Ron Paul about your concerns.
    --

  • [About some idea that this would be the last census.]
    Wishful thinking by the Clinton regime.

    They were trying to set a precedent that the census could be done by statistical sampling. If they had succeeded, they could then set up a "sampling" organization and make up any numbers they wanted.

    Oh, my. I guess I would find your argument way more convincing if there were even a shred of evidence that what you say is true. Seriously, I see the same old tripe parroted around by people who should really know better than this. So, as my daily dose of public service, let me point you towards an on-line article by Anderson and Fienberg [jhu.edu] that gives a solid introduction to the issues involved. To cut to the chase here, it is incredibly difficult to find a trained statistician who believes that the naive counting approach to the census could not be substantially helped by incorporating some form of sampling procedure. The problem, of course, is that it is incredibly difficult to find any *two* trained statisticians who agree with each other on what the best procedure would be, which gave politicians an easy way out ("See? Even the experts disagree...").

    To give a little bit more away, the primary use of sampling being contemplated was actually targeted at non-respondents. The problem here is that while you could follow up on most non-respondents very easily, there are a lot of them, so it takes time. And, the more time that passes before you follow-up, the worse the data get, and what you really end up with is a systematic undercount. Basically everybody on all sides of the political debate understands and agrees about this. What you should do about it is, of course, where the real fighting starts.

  • Those are the ones that you have zero control over. Some #$%^@ accidentally put it into a shared medical database that I have AIDS. Now I can't get insurance. Banks won't give me loans nor credit cards. I have tests proving I don't have AIDS yet I cannot cleanse this false information because there is no way I can even know every medical data warehouse that has the info. It's like it's it's been posted to USENET. I send cancel messages but the original post still manages to live on all over the place

    This has been originally modded as funny, but this kind of thing does happen. There is a serious problem between paper records getting mixed up, and other snafues, and that is documented with something just as mundane as credit records.

    Now you include this with the idea of medical records, and it can get very messy very quickly. I do not know if it really happened, but it is completely believable.

    In some ways, usenet is worse. There was a story a year or two ago about some exec at a major dot com who erased everything he wrote in the archives of the WELL, on the basis that it might be used in-appropriately against him, stuff he said when he was a freshman in college and stupid, etc.

    Usenet does not have such an erase option, not that I know of. And neither do these databases. You do not have any legal recourse I know of to fix false or messed up data in the medical records. This is very real.

  • do the math: you don't need a lot of data (Score:3)

    by q000921 ( 235076 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @07:58PM (#431284)
    My zipcode has perhaps 5000 people in it. My day of birth is shared by roughly 1/300th of the population, and my age probably by no more than 1/30th of the population.

    So, if I give you my zip code, day of birth, and age, there is a good chance that you can identify me uniquely based on publically accessible records. Any additional information, like income level, first name, hobbies, years of residence in this zip code, marital status, gender, etc. makes such identifications very reliable.

    There isn't a lot of anonymity, either off-line or on-line.

  • That may not be the best articulation of the idea, but you have a very important point:

    What is ultimately needed is a PERSONAL INFORMATION BILL OF RIGHTS that essentially confers real property rights upon the information about ME to ME. I then control transfer and possesion. I could even monetize it if I wished.

    That idea has been swimming in my head for some time. Why do we not control our own information? In the electronic world i don't seem to 'own' anything, not even myself. Yet 'ownership' is key in almost every aspect of social interaction and regulation. We should all own our own information; it is then ours to do with as we see fit. The act of using or gathering information about you without your consent then constitutes 'theft',

  • IANAL, but I would think this would definately fall as being a slander/libel lawsuite. It is false, hindering, and damages your reputation. What more is needed for such a lawsuite?
  • Free market? Since when is compelling somebody to submit information to the federal government allowed in a free society?

    The Census is supposed to be a head count, not a name count, and definitely not a survey of how many pubes every american has in his undies. Furthermore nobody should be forced to be counted, even anonymously. You gain nothing by refusing to be counted.
    ---
    >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
  • I have worked with census data, and even taken a course in data protection in DC, so I can clear up some things. First, census has two basic products. The first shows the number of people of each race, gender income category and age category by census block. If any category only has a few people in it, then that category is suppressed and the people in that category are added to a nearby one. So in rural Minnesota the one hispanic family is dropped replaced with a dash and a family is added to the 'white' category. There are theoretical attacks possible on this sort of data, especially where other tables are published. There are no examples of citizens complaining that their particular information has been disclosed. The second category of data are called 'public use files'. This is a sample of 1% of the forms, but with little or no geographic data. So in this file you can see that one person had this income category and that race and that age etc, through all the data in the census form. But you only know the state of residence. So you couldn't locate a particular individual. And the categories are wide enough that there would be multiple people with the same information, and census has computer programs to make sure that is the case. If it isn't, they fuzz the data a bit, untill it is. So far no citizen has ever complained that their personal info has been compromised by this data.
  • Actually, I filled in my racial information as "japanese", and taped a sheet to the form providing the location of the nearest former japanese internment camp, in case I needed to relocate...

    For moderators who don't get the joke, back in WW2, the Census provided information on the location of citizens of Japanese descent, to be imprisoned for the crime of having inscrutably slanted eyes.

  • They need to know how many people live there regardless of whether they are old enough to vote or not as congressional representation is based upon total population, not just eligible voter population.

    All the other information is used by the government so that they can make more informed decisions when they decide what government services to provide to who and how much to spend. Well, at least that's the theory, but I don't think letting them make those decisions without the information would improve things any.

  • Ok, so I don't fill out the Census, I don't allow cookies from any but a select few sites (gods, I love Mozilla) and I never register software unless I need to. Do I still get targetted ads?

    You betcha!

    The funny thing is that I never got a targetted ad that I cared enough about to respond to (except the "I hunt gay pedophiles, give me money" one, but that response was to the FBI). So, my question is this: why do these people continue. Are they finding some secret population of rich stupid people (or poor, even stupider people)?

    Ok, targetted ads asside, why should I worry? Well here' my list:
    • Da Gub'mint decides that <insert sub-culture group here> are evil and we must have a "war on <insert subculture group here>". I belong to a few subcultures, so this worries me (when they come for the people who write crypto in Perl [ajs.com], I'll be the first against the wall).
    • I really don't want my application for a home loan getting turned down because I happen to be a Linux user, and they default on loans .0002 percent more often than the baseline.
    • I worry about just how much of my life will be on that piece of paper the guy across the table is holding in a job interview.
    This all seems remote and unlikely now, but so did reverse-engineering the Census data 10 years ago.... :-(
  • As a genealogist, I've spent a lot of time digging around old census records. The first one was in 1790 and the records for every census through 1920 are publicly available.

    The 1790 census simply asked for the last name of the head of household and the number, age, sex and free/slave status of other household members. It was felt that knowing how many men of fighting age was important to such a new country.

    As the years progressed, other information was collected and census results started being used for other purposes (i.e., to decide where to locate a school for the blind or deaf.)

    So, other information was collected. The "how long does it take you to get to work" question might be used when mass transit decisions are made for example.

    None of these additional questions are in the constitutional mandate of the Census Bureau, but that has never stopped them.

    Personally, I'm thrilled that my ancestors answered all the questions, although I often doubt how correct they were. It all depended on who answered the door the day the enumerator came around.

    By the way, I received and completed the long form.
    --
    "You despise me, don't you?"
  • He said 'Day of Birth' not 'Date'

    It's pretty obvious that he means something like '28th June'

    -Ciaran
  • I too answered human for race. The guy gave me a strange look (he had dropped by), but I stuck by my guns.

  • I trade my grocery cards every once in a while. Come to think of it I started by borrowing a card from someone else, and traded that, so they don't have my name, and my data is mixed with someone else's.

    I also try to buy most of my stuff that has advertised that they don't take those cards. Poked fun at the sillyness of the whole thing. (Their major compitor in town switched cards a couple years back so everyone had to get new cards)

  • Does that make you part of the "paranoid isolationist" target market or the "dislikes advertising" target market?

    :-)
  • ... it is incredibly difficult to find a trained statistician who believes that the naive counting approach to the census ould not be substantially helped by incorporating some form of sampling procedure. The problem, of course, is that it is incredibly difficult to find any *two* trained statisticians who agree with each other on what the best procedure would be ...

    I must disagree with you. The issue is not that sampling COULD be more accurate. The issue is that corrupt politicians could more easily distort the results to their own advantage.

    The test of any law is not how it would work if it were administered by honest people, but how much havoc it could cause if administered by DIShonest tyrants.
  • i work for a pr agency in thesummer, it makes me part of the 'i get my fill of advertising at work' target market, as well as the 'leave me alone you stupid telemarketers' target market and the 'media saturation' demographic.
  • Why is everyone so f%^&ing paranoid?

    Just a guess, but... the same people who insist that advertising doesn't make them buy stuff also have an irrational fear that marketers can force them to buy stuff simply by informing them that it exists.
  • ...is not something any of us can take for granted any more. Every single day little facts about all of us are being recorded, stored and (probably) cross-referenced. The government does it, businesses do it, it's the way things are.
    The fact that census data can be used to track back to its subject isn't really anything amazing or astounding, for years now it's been relatively easy to find out pretty much anything about anyone. It make take a while and require a bit of cash, but really it's the people with time and money that we really need to worry about. It's a pretty logical extension of this that sooner or later it was going to start working back the other way.
    As much as it's a cliche, Big Brother is watching, and will continue to do so. The best you can hope for is that they won't notice you.
    Gev
  • You only get one day of birth, or birthday. After that, at one year intervals, you get an anniversary of that day.
  • I got a job as a census taker in 1980. We had a list of Each and Every house that failed to fill in a form, and it was our job to return three times to try to get the info (knock knock... knock knock...), and then on the third try we were instructed to ask neighbors and, failing that, try to guess how many lived there (toys in yard, clothes on line, cars in driveway). We only had to resort to that in a very few cases. This was in rural Florida.

    Man, the government isn't really being the bad guy, here... fight Carnivore, fight Echelon, fight RIAA. Don't fight the stupid Census, for chrissakes...
  • I am recieving magazines and spam for an alias that does not exist. They must have quite the little profile on the fictional dude...

    I recommend that you all try it, it's a great waste of their resources. That, and mail back all the business reply forms... with some lead shot in them...

  • That's probably why most (all the one's I've seen at least) credit card applications require your social security number to be put on the app in the first place.
  • What's the punishment for lying on the census form?
  • Secondly, this is the LAST census. Do I believe them?
    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.

    -- United States Constitution, Article I, Section 2
    Of course, it would hardly be the first time the government has blatantly violated the Constitution....
    /.
  • ... [census bureau administration told their workers that] this is the LAST census.

    Wishful thinking by the Clinton regime.

    They were trying to set a precedent that the census could be done by statistical sampling. If they had succeeded, they could then set up a "sampling" organization and make up any numbers they wanted.

    If you think jerrymandering distorts the electoral process, imagine what would happen if the party in power could assign any population numbers they wanted (within reason) to each state, thus changing the state's number of representatives and electoral votes.

    Fortunately the courts slapped 'em down.

  • UK-Info Disk (Score:3)

    by Aztech ( 240868 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @05:21PM (#431309)
    There's a similar thing happend in Britain where a company has published "UK-Info Disk", they basically take all the divergent and distributed information from electoral roles, land registry, tax registration, private marketing databases, phone books and then combine and link all the information together on Ordinent Survey maps, so basically you have find out huge amounts of information from a simple postcode (zip).

    There's also cracks of the program that let you back trace the database and do any number of reverse lookups (criminals find this especially useful). It seems the developers purposely put these weaknesses into the product as hidden features.

    Because the data is legally obtained in the UK then sent to the Caymen Isles or processing it basically circumvents all the British Data Protection and Freedom of Information Laws.

    The Info Disk company have spun off 192.com [192.com] which offers similar services, ironically they advertise the "The Big Breach" book from a former MI6 officer on their front-page, a book which is somewhat forbidden in the UK... however 192.com are hardly champions of free-speech when you delve into the infringing and questionable practices they use.

  • Profiling (Score:1)

    by jjr ( 6873 )
    What alot companies sell is data profiling they will assign a person with traits that live in zip code 12345-6789 they use they cenus to do that. Right or wrong it has been done for years. I do not see that being stop anytime soon.

  • For all the paranoia that's being spouted here, it's nice to hear that the census is taking steps to deal with the issue, which is actually the main thrust of the article. The Census department itself is the one that stepped up and admitted that this is an issue, not some third party that's threatening to break everyone's privacy. They're deliberately fuzzing the data to remove individually identifying data, and even taking steps that may decrease it's usefullness (like letting it out in bigger aggregate blocks) in order to make it even harder. Perhaps the best quote was at the end of the article:

    The re-identification process is highly complex and doesn't have a high yield: In a Census Bureau test, only 10 percent of survey participants could be re-identified. But that is enough for the bureau to be concerned.

    "I think many people feel they could probably obtain information easier from some other source than trying to obtain it from a census file," says the bureau's Ms. Zayatz, "but we're still very protective."

    That does not sound like a government agency that's eager to breach people's privacy.

  • Yes, yes, you're right, technically. In the sense that the Constitution is 'owned' by, and drafted for it's citizens, it would defeat the purpose, I think (of course it's only *my* interpretation) that something defined in the Constitution be defied by the citizens it's supposd to support.

    Sorta like defying the Bill of Rights on an individual basis, because it's 'only' supposed to apply towards the Government but not it's citizens? This in a country where the Government is 'by the people, for the people'?

    -AS
  • Just because Congress can pass laws to regulate the Census doesn't mean they can expand their powers! Next they will pass a law saying the Census can take urine samples and you'll say that's legal.
    ---
    >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent

  • This is bizarre. We're supposed to believe that it's unconstitutional to use the best available statistical sampling approaches to figure out how many people live in a given area, but that it's just fine to rely on the neighbors or a guess based on toys in the yard? What in hell was the Supreme Court smoking?

  • Congress isn't allowed to expand the power of the Census. Just because they can choose the method by which the Census is carried out doesn't mean they can give Census personel guns to shoot anybody who doesn't fill in questions, or demand urine samples.

    The Census would be little different if they demanded urine samples. They are supposed to get a head count, not a name count, and not a blood count.
    ---
    >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
  • The whole point is it's COERCED!!!

    I frequently tell companies what I want. I often take the initiative. But when I don't fill out their forms I'm not fined $100 per question!
    ---
    >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
  • >Let me get this straight. You simultaneously feel sorry for
    >him, and intentionally cause him the grief that you feel
    >sorry he has?

    Yes. Let me explain for the mentally impaired:

    1. I feel sorry for him. He's an ordinary average guy. He had (or felt he had) to actually stake me out to get my Census information.

    2. He's getting paid - however little - by the government, and volunteered to do the job.

    #2 tends to negate #1. He was there because he signed up to be there and was getting paid to be there.

    If I hadn't posted to this thread, I'd -1 Flamebait ya. Oh well.

    Shaun
  • I agree.
    The only questions we answered at my house were the number of people and race (human).

  • ...was their keen interest in what time I go to work, how many hours per day I work, what days I work, and how long the commute takes.

    Damn, I saw "Enemy of the State", and that information looked like the stuff you'd need to make sure that a person would be unavailable for a few hours while they check out your house.

    There's no way in hell I'm going to officially register the time periods when my house will go unmonitored.

  • I am an Australian. What are the questions asked in the US Census? Is there a link to the questions? Everyone here seems to make it sounds as if the questions are very personal.
  • If given your date of birth I could probably figure out your age without a lot of trouble unless I had been kept in sensory deprivation for so long that I had no idea what year it is.
  • As for all the "I don't fill in the forms" people, a census is one of the primary defined tasks of governments, and not just counting the people. How is a government supposed to plan what facilities are required at what places if they don't know what type of people live where ? Plotting population trends across the years is how you figure out where to build schools, roads, retirement homes, etc.

    Because that's not the purpose of the census, that's the function of the legislature.

    Read the Constitution. It clearly says that the purpose of the census is for the allocation of representatives only.

    There are much better ways to identify individuals than using Census data...

    Really? Tell that to the Department of Defense. Back in WWII (when they were still called the Department of War), it was census data they used to locate and round up Asian-Americans and put them into concentration camps.

    So much for agregation of the data, huh?

    Privacy is important. Come see Philip Zimmerman [lpma.org] talk about Privacy in the Internet Era.

  • So that's why that "download your baby photo" hoax was collecting people's birthdays.

  • This shouldn't suprise anyone (Score:5)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @04:45PM (#431324) Homepage
    But it should make you a little queasy. That meta-self that runs your life has been out there since the first person started collecting data. It isn't YOU that walks into a bank and asks for a loan. It isn't your suit that gets you that loan.

    John Q. Banker smiles at the physical YOU and then goes and finds out about your meta-self. This person has much more clout in the world than you ever will. This person is your credit rating, your pay stubs, etc. That person means so much more.

    And now the census. A huge compilation of data. The pot of gold at the end of the advertising/data mining rainbow. Of COURSE they will find a way to use it. It is just to valuable to the open market. This is an advertisers dream. Targeted information on a broad scale down to the very last detail.

    And so the real question here lies in not whether the motivations are just for doing this. We made this situation by having a free market system. The question is what the census will do to protect that data, or how they will re-work their questions to protect the individual. Otherwise, there will be a huge resistance to ever filling out a census form again.

    THAT would be a shame, because the census really does some good for people, as big and lumbering as it is.
  • Demonstrating intent? I'd argue that the rejection industry (the people who decide that you can't have a loan, get insurance, etc) isn't deliberately trying to harm his reputation. In their minds it's a mistake, like the newspaper publishing the police blotter and mispelling the perp's name and putting yours in its place.

    The problem is that the rejection industry has little motivation to provide accurate information. Business buys their services precisely because they provide a list of people who must pay higher interest rates or can't get decent insurance. If these services were held to higher standards of accuracy -- were forced to err on the side of acceptance rather than rejection -- they would have a much more difficult time making their service seem worthwhile.

    The other problem is the incestuous databasing market -- they keep repackaging and reselling the same data over and over, much like the parent posters' complaint about USENET. This data is then merged into their databases, even thought it might start including attributes that were purged due to inaccuracy. If the purged-now-active attribute lives long enough, it gets sold to another company, so if even you correct the one you've already corrected the "bad" data will likely come back again in a future database merge.

    My mother has been dead for nearly a year (we are her official address), and she still gets credit card offers and other mass mailings. I'm wondering how long she'll actually "live" in the databanks..

  • I only give 'em this... (Score:3)

    by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @04:46PM (#431326) Journal
    When the census polls me, I tell them:

    "There are people of voting age residing here. There are people who will be of voting age by the next census."

    That's all they're constitutionally entitled to know. (Actually, it's even more than they're entitled to know. The first half is sufficient.)

    They try to make it SOUND like you have to answer all the rest of the questions or face a fine. You don't.
  • Heh, all though this is pretty worrisome, at the same time you have to wonder how much they already know about us...
  • That's why I drive a Chameleon! (Old SNL ref - name may be wrong)

  • Heh. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Good thing I didn't take the census.

    Now... should I post this under my real account? :)
  • We have a Census now and there's still bad government planning...how is each and every citizen doing their civic duty like a good boy or girl going to help that out?

  • I worry more about PRIVATE cabals (med insurance). (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @04:44PM (#431331)
    Those are the ones that you have zero control over. Some #$%^@ accidentally put it into a shared medical database tha tI have AIDS. Now I can't get insurance. Banks won't give me loans nor credit cards. I have tests proving I don't have AIDS yet I cannot cleanse this false information because there is no way I can even know every medical data warehouse that has the info. It's like it's it's been posted to USENET. I send cancel messages but the original post still manages to live on all over the place.

  • Protect your privacy: Only answer question #1 (Score:5)

    by snellac ( 314920 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @04:47PM (#431332)
    The Census Bureau says it's your civic duty to answer these snooping questions. In reality, it's your patriotic duty to refuse to answer. You can strike a blow for privacy, equality, and liberty by declining to answer every question on the Census form except the one required by the Constitution: How many people live in your home?

    The U.S. Constitution says the purpose of the Census is to make an "actual enumeration." That is, to take an accurate count of Americans for the purpose of apportioning congressional districts. But the federal government has gone far beyond that mandate. The long version of the Census -- which one in every six households will receive -- contains a whopping 52 questions. That's 51 more than the Constitution requires. Maybe that's why compliance with the Census had plummeted to just 65% by 1990.

    Unfortunately, the government has ways of making you talk. Title 13, Chapter 7 of the U.S. code mandates a $100 fine for those who decline to answer Census questions. What kind of government demands, under penalty of law, reams of personal data -- including racial characteristics -- from its citizens? Ours does. That's why it's time for some polite, patriotic civil disobedience. If you care about privacy, genuine equality, and old-fashioned American liberty, the arrival of the Census form is your chance to literally stand up and be counted.

    Tell them how many people live in your home, and that's all. Maybe $100 is a small price to pay for making a principled stand for privacy and freedom.

    -snellac
  • From the article:
    Knowing, for example, the names and addresses of wealthy people in a certain area who endure a lengthy commute every day would allow marketers of cellphones, car stereos, books on tape and other driving accouterments to home in on likely customers.
    Now, wait a second here -- I know that if I was somebody who made a rather lengthy daily commute to work, I would be interested in products that would make the trip easier. It's comprable (kinda.. sorta..) to targeted advertising on television. People who watch sports channels tend to buy more beer and sports magazines.. you don't see those ads on a children's channel, right? It's just targeted advertising..

    .. on the other hand, I don't really want somebody knowing how much money I make, what kind of car I drive, or how many children I have. I think that this is really pushing it.

    Just my $0.02

    ------------
    CitizenC
  • Jeez, talk about advocating cutting off your nose to spite your face!

    People like you (republicans, libertarians, and those who are just plain ignorant), who hold the census to its strict constitutional interperetation of "actual enumeration" do the US, and the world a disservice. Why, because a proper statistical sample of the population of the United States would be much more accurate than attempting to actually count every person. In fact, the census uses a statistically adjusted (survey) count for its official data. Except for the case of redistricting and federal funding, where they have been blocked by republican opposition, who recognize that they would lose lots of power if we actually took into account the millions of uncounted poor americans!

    Furthermore, the detailed nature of the survey is what makes the US census the best source of social-science data in the world. You advocate destroying thousands of studies which provide wonderful insights into the way our world works.

    stand up against science and poor people, answer only question #1!
  • "There are people of voting age residing here. There are people who will be of voting age by the next census."

    Oops. Make that:

    "There are [M] people of voting age residing here. There are [N] people who will be of voting age by the next census."

    I keep forgetting that angle brackets delimit HTML tags and I hit the "submit" rather than the "preview" button. (I'd do the hack to get the angle brackets in there but I'm not at the computer where I made the note on how to do it.)
  • do_rant(Census)
    {
    It never ceases to amaze me how so many really smart people on here can overlook the basic point.

    People bitch and moan about credit card companies wanting to know this that and the other. We bitch and moan about internet surveys that we fill out to register for a free service or even one we pay for.

    We get upset and afraid of the US Census asking us the same questions. Why?

    When Visa, or the New York times wants to get all that information they ask for it. We can decline to give it to them. Sure, we don't get The Times or we don't get our credit card, but we don't HAVE to give them the information.

    We are required by law to tell the US Census these things. That's really very terrifying. Sure, the penality for not filling out this that and the other is 100 bucks. But what's to keep Congress from deciding that the penality needs to be stiffer? The voters? The public? The concerned citizen?

    Oh please.

    As much as I'd like to say that these things make a difference they don't. Election participation is in the toilet. Those that do participate vote (for the most part) party line tickets and blindly follow a party because that's what they've always done.

    There's an escape. There always is. But the problems we face now are a symptom of letting democracy slip from the hands of the many into the hands of the few. The Census can do this... well... great. Who does it benefit? It benefits the companies who get access to the data.

    The US Census: Marketing Department. Your tax dollars at work.

    return;
    }

    This has been another useless post from....
  • "Confidentiality is key at the Census Bureau, since almost no one would participate in the great decennial inquisition without it. "

    I remember when the census forms arrived at my residence. There was a paragraph stating that it is illegal for me to lie or to decline to report my census information. Is this incorrect? Could I in fact just simply refuse to participate?

    - tokengeekgrrl

  • That's the problem with the system today. Pretty sad if you do have AIDS and you can't get loans or insurance or credit cards. How can you live like that? How is that not discrimination?

  • right....except that they have the resources to match information. If they have your name and address they can match a social security number to it, and they assume that you forgot to enter it. So they send you the information back with all the information.

    2600 may be wrong in the article, but for the most part i have found their articles to be true.

    To read it for yourself, just go to any barnes and nobles and pick up a copy for 5 bucks....the current one is blue with a picture of bellsouth on the cover.
  • They require a SSN to _reject_ a credit card app?
    --
  • Imagine if the census was taken by examining the contents of people's refrigerators. From just a look inside the whole story about them is revealed. Whether a person is single or married. If they have kids and how old they are. How much money they made. Race, age, male, female, how many people are in the house hold--all is revealed by the fridge. The good thing about this is that nobody has to say a word to the bean counters. It's just a knock at the door and the guy says, "Hi, I'm from the Census and I'm here to photograph your refrigerator."
  • Why would that be good/bad? E-Mail??

  • They say they give 100,000 person conglomerations (OK, 400,000 now).

    If they said there was 1 Guatamalan family with 10 kids and a Porsche, sure, you could identify that family.

    But if they say there is 1 Guatamalan family, 100 family with 10 kids, and 1000 families with Porsches, I don't see how you could identify them.

    Do they report the first or the second? I thought they reported the second. If they're reporting the first, what do they mean by 100,000 family groupings? That sounds more like 1 family groupings to me.

  • More than just "theoretical" - it's a feature. (Score:4)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @05:31PM (#431344) Journal
    If the Census Bureau didn't want correlation to happen, they'd ask far fewer questions, like "how many people live here" instead of "Are you Guatemalan or Honduran or Salvadoran? N years of school? How many bedrooms and bathrooms in the house? How many kids, and what ages?" - The information about kids alone can easily be correlated with school records, and the housing information with real estate tax and building inspection records. And it's even easier for government officials to do that than for businesses. Census tracts are small enough that the number of couples where the husband is Guatemalan and the wife Salvadoran and the kids are boy 12 and girl 10 are likely to be just 1.

    Correlating information used to be hard, back when computers were big and expensive - businesses could still do it, but it had to be financially worthwhile to dedicate time from that 10-MIPS multi-megabuck mainframe which had two megs of memory, 250MB DASD, and a tape drive. That machine now fits in your pocket, and your desktop machine can do amazing queries with free data from the internet and cheap mapping programs - any data that's been collected can pretty much be correlated with anything else, and the only way to prevent that is not to collect it in the first place.


    Remember that the laws protecting privacy of census data aren't graven in stone - they apply only until Congress feels like changing them because they've got some political goal or other. And the US military got access to census data in the 40s to use it for arresting Japanese-Americans because of their race - in spite of the 2000 Census bragging about how nobody's violated their privacy in 50 years, which is since 1950, after the war was over....

  • Obscuring data using graph theory (Score:3)

    by mtsang ( 316278 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @07:02PM (#431345)
    One application of the famous min cut/max flow algorithm in graph theory (wooo!) is to consistently round matrix entries. i.e. (tricky definition) The rows sums and column sums of the rounded elements in the matrix are equal to the rounded row and column sums of the unaltered elements of the matrix.

    I hear you asking. Who cares?

    One application of this sort of matrix rounding is
    publishing confidential survey data. Rounding can disguise the data, so that it is not traceable to any particular individual.

    The reference below describes that the class of matrix rounding problems is equivalent to the flow problem in certain capacitated network flow models. Feasible flows can be found using the 'min cut/max flow' algorithm. The author proves that there is always a feasible solution for a subclass where marginal totals are uniformly confined.

    reference:
    Management Science, Vol. 12, No. 9, May 1966
    Bacharach, Michael. "Matrix Rounding Problems"

    since it is an old reference, I will attempt to convey the setup. The network is constructed as follows:

    The matrix to round, A, has individual entries, A(ij) arranged in rows and columns...

    Make a set X, consisting of a node, i, for each row in the matrix. Make a set Y consisting of a node, j, for each column in the matrix.
    Add an arc (i,j) representing each matrix entry A(ij). (Note X union Y is a bipartite graph)

    Add a source node s and attach it to each element in X, and a sink node t and attach it to each element in Y, the resulting arcs (s,i) represent each row sum and arcs (j,t) each column sum. The lower and upper bounds for all arcs should correspond to the lower and upper rounding limits of the original matrix entry, or the rounding limits for each row/column sum as appropriate.

    Any feasible (integer) flow from s to t, will correspond to an acceptable (integer) rounding of values. (And a maximum flow will give us a feasible flow.)

  • On the other hand, why is everyone so pissed at marketers? As long as I can "opt out" (and I should be allowed to do that, I agree), I'm fine with customized advertisements. They are great!

    Sure, it's great to get well-presented brochures and catalogs detailed nifty stuff you never knew existed. The first time. The second time, there isn't much interesting info there. By the third, you're ignoring it, and starting to get stuff from marketers who guessed less well what your interests are.

    But that's OK, you can just opt-out. It only takes you about fifteen minutes finding their opt-out email address, and composing and sending email. The fact that they accidentally accidentally added your address to their list twice (spelled slightly differently the second time) is easily sorted out by a long-distance phone call in only 60 minutes on the phone, spread over 3 days.

    However, the secondary bunch of advertisers are too numerous, or claim to send you stuff just as a "one off" promotion. You don't need to opt out, they promise not to send you anything else. "No, that was a different company who just uses the same publisher." You decide to leave it and just use their (glossy, hard to burn) paper in your wood heater.

    Then you move house. The person moving into your new house asks what to do about all this addressed mail that's coming in. You've changed all your addresses elsewhere, so you ask him to just bin it. However, you forgot to change your address in one place out of hundreds, and never get an important letter which really pisses you off. Meanwhile, you're getting pretty annoyed by having to deal with the junk mail coming in for the previous owners of your new house.

    So in my experience, it's better to not end up on anyone's mailing list. Now, this isn't life-threatening or anything. In fact, I used to think it was completely harmless too. It's just highly irritating, and overall wastes a lot of your time that they aren't paying for. The inconvenience (not just to you, but anyone who lives where you used to) is absolutely not worth the benefits.

  • As with any right, if one does not defend and exercise it on the most extreme grounds, one will find it gradually being eroded. (i.e. differences in warrants today and twenty years ago...thank you, drug war justice.)

    The core issue isn't whether or not the Census bureau is trying to keep your information private, the issue is whether or not they should be collecting detailed information in the first place.

    I doubt the Census Bureau is "eager to breach people's privacy", and I do respect their work as valuable--but in the course of their more invasive work, they end up violating people's privacy. The constitutionally mandated right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects [loc.gov] includes the right to tell census workers go to sod off.

    While that detailed information is most conveniently gathered during the census, I do believe that much of it is invasive, error-prone and would be much better collected through alternative research methods...like, say, measuring school enrollment for education funding and volume, weight and speed of automobile traffic to fund roads.


  • I think you mean "team of moderators on crack" - far more common as far as I can tell.

    HTH

    -- Pete.
  • I go into my local grocery store and purchase something really bizarre once every couple of weeks just to throw a wrinkle in the records...

    I like getting coupons for imported escargo, matzo ball boxes and parakeet shampoo...

  • Sorry, my mistake, I was talking about all the other countries in the world (I don't live in the US). In Aus, and a few other places, it is a primary defined task of the government.

    Well, I made an assumption too, for which I apologize. I thought you were a US citizen. US citizens should certainly have no excuse for not reading their own Constitution once in a while.

    As I understood the way this happened, they used the raw census forms (which are destroyed in most countries after entry) not the summary data. The legality of this and the risks is open to debate, but the point of the original article was that you could identify individuals from the summary data, and that's what I was explaining, and my comment related to the "legal" information.

    The way it was related to me, it had nothing to do with the raw forms. As I understood it, supposedly "agregate" data was used to locate Asian-american neighborhoods, which were then swept for Japanese names.

  • it wouldn't surprise me if this becomes more of an online physical manifestation in the future--something like the metaverse where you have an avatar--and a credit rating to go with it--its also a lot like idoru where you can figure out a LOT about a person based on their computer records...


    mov ax, 13h
    int 10h

  • Obscuring the data (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK, I worked with Census data 10+ years ago (I put the US, Australian, UK and other censuses onto CDROMs - product was called SuperMap) so I know a bit about the data and the formats it's available in. And yes, the data I used was the most detailed that they release.

    All censuses worldwide only release summary detail for various sizes of geographic areas, and they release detailed info only for larger areas (eg detailed crosstabs are available at county level and state level, whereas at zip code level only very basic info is relased).

    Generally any number which is less than a lower limit (typically 15) is ALWAYS rounded to 0, and all other numbers are statistically rounded (eg Aus census rounds to multiples of 3, that is 37 is rounded to 36 two-thirds of the time, and to 39 one-third of the time). In addition to this automated pass, the data is hand-massaged by statisticians to obscure anything else that they think may identify individuals.

    So some of the examples quoted above (eg "the number of families with one Asian parent, one Jewish parent and 4 children is 1") are pure and simple wrong - census summary data just does not make this information available.

    Remember that some of the first "computers" (mechanical tabulators) were actually built for the US census in 1890. The statisticians have known for a long time that computers are used to interpret the data (using the census data off microfiche was never a real option), techniques may change, but the staff spend a lot of time and effort working to prevent releasing data on individuals.

    As for all the "I don't fill in the forms" people, a census is one of the primary defined tasks of governments, and not just counting the people. How is a government supposed to plan what facilities are required at what places if they don't know what type of people live where ? Plotting population trends across the years is how you figure out where to build schools, roads, retirement homes, etc.

    There are much better ways to identify individuals than using Census data...

    T

  • I am going to complain because the Fedral government is stealing money from the states that should be used for building roads and then redistributing it to states that meet their unconstitutional guidelines. The Constitution specifically limits the Fedral government from passing any law that is not provided for within the Constitution. A minimum DUI cutoff is not there, so in order to enforce this illegal provision the government steals money from its taxpayers and then gives it back to states that obey its not-quite-laws.

    Additionally I don't see any way that the distribution of Fedral highway funding is dependent on any census data other than counting people. The main way that highway funding is distributed is based on whether or not states comply with fedral standards in several places. Even if they did use census data I fail to see how that would help highway planning better than collecting agregate road usage data using traffic counters.

    On top of this I fail to see how filling out a question about my race and a second question about having hispanics in my house is helping the Fedral government with any program, legitimate or not, that does not discriminate on the basis of race.

  • Look up the subject "metatron". Theories regarding this idea involve the movement of society to a data-based entity, ultimately more important than its people.
  • This is why, hypothetically of course, that one might want to tell a census worker that one is one's own relative, and that the relative who is the actual owner of the house is overseas and that one is just visiting the place to look after it. No one is presently residing there. Poof, no census form required. Not that I'd ever do this, nosiree. I trust my government.
  • untill they can link to slashdot accounts...
  • OK, first, what's the big deal? What NEW information can they get? When you apply for a credit card, you give out your yearly income and number of people in the family anyway, and if you apply for a mortgage the bank knows everything about you.

    On the other hand, why is everyone so pissed at marketers? As long as I can "opt out" (and I should be allowed to do that, I agree), I'm fine with customized advertisements. They are great! Take, for example, Amazon - I spend quite a bit of time there, searching for books on technical and non-technical subjects, music, and so on, and after a while they know me so well that they point me to lots of stuff that I like but would've never known existed without them telling me. What's wrong with that?! Why is everyone so f%^&ing paranoid?
  • Not the last census. It's (hopefully) the last Census with the long form. The Census Bureau plans to replace the decennial long form with the American Communities Survey.
  • I have a tendency to make stuff up on survey forms -- I say what I want them to hear. eg: if I get a survey asking me where I heard from company X, I usually say "From a Friend", as it will influence them to care more about what people think of them based on experience rather than placing more ads in magazines.

    It could be possible to do the same with Censuses (Censi? Censum?), if it's not illegal... Tell the government what you want them to hear... I don't know what this means legally in the USA or in my own Australia, but I think the idea could have merit...

    rr

  • How is a government supposed to plan what facilities are required at what places if they don't know what type of people live where ? Plotting population trends across the years is how you figure out where to build schools, roads, retirement homes, etc.

    The same way they decide anythng of course. By listening to the lobbyists which fill their pockets with the most money.

    Rich

  • The processes they described DO corrupt the data for statisitcal analysis.

    When they switch some of the entries among people on the same block you can't get proper results when looking for correlations.

    When they add noise your statistical significance tresholds rise and you can't detect small effects.

  • Re:I worry more about PRIVATE cabals (med insuranc (Score:4)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @05:32PM (#431367)
    The above should be modded up even higher than it is. As much as I hate government regulation, the credit/medical/rejection database industry needs to be regulated with the kind of scrutiny we only wish the nuclear power industry was regulated with.

    A goverment agency or administrative court needs to have the power to issue "cancel" requests for this kind of thing. Any database vendor found to be carrying the "cancled" information after 90 days should be fined $100k per incident, payable to the person listed, and forced to remove the data with 7 days or face another $100k fine, with an injunction to follow that the data be removed THAT DAY and if found the next day, fined $500k and barred from buying, selling or collecting information until the error is corrected. All databases carrying medical, credit or other information use to deny, limit or otherwise screen access to credit, medical or insurance services should be required to be run against the "cancel" database every year and ALWAYS before being sold AND after being bought before they may be used as a screening tool.

    It's too easy for the rejection industry (banks, medical, insurance, et al) to get bad data into their systems and not take it out or somehow keep reintroducing it (usually by swapping data with their fellow purveyors of rejection data). The USENET analogy is perfect.
  • Did you know that most people can be identified by only their birthday, area code, and 1 or 2 interests. Yet another reason to lie on on-line regestration forms. C:\ C:\Dos C:\dos\run C:\dos\get\shot\with\a\shotgun

    C:\
    C:\Dos
    C:\dos\run
  • There is a law that says failure to respond to any question is punishable by a $100 fine. As others have pointed out, that's on rather shaky legal ground since the Constitution requires and allows only an "actual enumeration", which is fulfilled by the question "how many people live at your residence?" More practically, I'm pretty sure I recall Census officials saying they were not going to enforce the fines. I answered the first question, left the rest blank, and was never bothered (although that's probably because I moved shortly afterwards).
  • So, from other posts, it's been brought to my attention that it's in the Constitution, even, that the government hold a Census. Refusing to cooperate in the Census is actually 'unconstitutional', rather than illegal.

    On the other hand, Census information is used to determine the number and nature of Congressional seats and representations. It may also be used to dictate reapportioning of taxes according to some formula. It may also be involved in a handful of other useful things, but any more is wild speculation.

    In the letter of the Constitution then, it would seem you need to tell them how many people live in your household, and maybe how many are of voting age. In the spirit of the Constitution, answering the Census is 'supposed' to help make our government more responsive and adapted to your country's needs.

    -AS

  • getting credit reports aren't impossible (Score:3)

    by unformed ( 225214 ) on Wednesday February 14, 2001 @05:03PM (#431392)
    there's an article in the current issue of 2600 [2600.com] on how to get anybody's credit information.

    Basically the method is:
    1. Get a MasterCard/Visa application, whatever.
    2. Enter the target's current address into the "Previous Address" section on the application.
    3. Enter your address (or the dropsite address) in the "Current Address" section.
    4. Enter their name and birthday in the information section.
    5. Leave the rest of the application blank. (You don't want the application accepted, and if it's accepted you'll be in a shitload of trouble.
    6. The agency will match the person with their name and the "previous address" but because no income information is mentioned they'll reject the application.
    7. By law, the agency is required to send a notice of rejection to you., which will have the person's social security number on it.

    And once you have a social security number, you're set: Go get a driver's license, and you're a new man (or woman, if that's they way you swing :) )

    Discalaimer: This is provided for informational purposes only, I do not condone any misuse of such information...yada yada
  • I sure hope this was NOT the last census.

    I enjoy living in a Republic. How can I be represented if I am not counted?

    -Peter


    "There is no number '1.'"

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