Saturday, January 05, 2019
The usual meaningless "debate"
As always, a meaningless "debate" over questions that are either irrelevant or perfectly reversed.
This "debate" is about trying to make Census data more private.
The move has implications that extend far beyond the research community. Proponents of differential privacy say a fierce, ongoing legal battle over plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census has only underscored the need to assure people that the government will protect their privacy.The original obsolete constitution required a census every 10 years TO DETERMINE WHERE THE VOTERS ARE. Since voters have to be citizens, a question about citizenship is the ONLY question that is REQUIRED. If the original constitution still existed, this "fierce battle" would be unnecessary because citizenship would be the ONLY question asked by the census. We wouldn't have to decide whether it was "violating" "rights", because determining citizenship is the sole DUTY of the census. The specifics of the debate are technically valid and interesting.......
“Any time you release a statistic, you’re leaking something,” explains Jerry Reiter, a professor of statistics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has worked on differential privacy as a consultant with the Census Bureau. “The only way to absolutely ensure confidentiality is to release no data. So the question is, how much risk is OK? Differential privacy allows you to put a boundary” on that risk. A database can be considered differentially protected if the information it yields about someone doesn’t depend on whether that person is part of the database. Differential privacy was originally designed to apply to situations in which outsiders make a series of queries to extract information from a database. In that scenario, each query consumes a little bit of what the experts call a “privacy budget.” After that budget is exhausted, queries are halted in order to prevent database reconstruction..... but irrelevant. In fact all of this information is already available to criminals and corporations and governments. (Sorry, redundant.) Everyone who has ever been online has been hacked. Intentional off-gridders may be exempt, but intentional off-gridders aren't going to answer census questionnaires anyway, so they're outside the terms of the debate.
Labels: From rights to duties
¶ 7:40 AM
