alt Hacker NewsDemographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.
The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way.
The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.
Replies
> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.
What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood.
Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?
The whole thing is over noise introduced to publicized documents to disguise the specifics of people in specific addresses, and malicious actors misrepresenting that as fraud.
For example census data was and probably is available on the block level but in order to avoid exposing the data of people living in these blocks that might be a few families, the publicized data aggregated and smoothed the data over blocks so you had cases where a block with a few single family residences reported over 100 people living in them. Obviously certain actors shouted voter fraud over the top of their lungs.
So now the law says no fudging of publicized data to preserver privacy, the government always had the actual accurate data.
The obvious solution to this problem is to just hide the sensitive data instead of fudging them.
In the above example the block would now report 10 people living there, but not their racial, religious, ethnic, or socioeconomic conditions.