You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more.

The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level.

Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.

This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.

This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.

The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.

Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

Yes.

Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data.

Why?

Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc.

All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1).

At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed?

(1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...

Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.

The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000

Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?

It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have.

Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion.

Thanks.

have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.

You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.

>It’s a census: it just asks questions.

Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

> they’ll just lie or not answer

The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions.

In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face.

For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses.

1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census.

2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?

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The entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.