Fundamentally this is public data. If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is.
There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is simply not one of those things.
publishing should be the default for any data, and to keep it unpublished should require substantially good reasons that impact the country as a whole. Frankly, if it isn't detailed national defence plans, i struggle to see any data that should not be public.
The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions.
A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home.
If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible.
Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.
But the devil is in the details. If we don't want advertisers constructing semi-complete profiles from simple web interactions then why would we publish 330 million census questionnaires for their use?
They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.
2. Without noise injection it's rather simple to do statistical attacks to reverse engineer individual entities.
3. This data is and has already been used in the past to undermine democratic systems by targeting and disenfranchising minorities, as well as gerrymandering the US to hell.
4. "Too dangerous to make public, too dangerous to collect" - this is a false dichotomy. To govern effectively you need sensitive data, but it should be collected and used in a way that's safe for the individuals.
5. Macro level aggregates don't need individual exposure, that's why noise, anonymization and statistical functions are fine.
So I'll just go ahead and ask, give me good reasons why this data should be private?
My guess is that most of you think we should be counting illegals because they should have representation. And I reject that
(Do you reject that? As someone who uses the phrase "counting illegals" I imagine you would be interested in knowing what that number is.)
So unless you're willing to also say that counted illegals cannot used for either of those, then you're just being obtuse.
But if we can agree that they cannot be used for that then sure, lets identify and count them. If we can't identify (make non-private) and count them then why should we trust that those counts are accurate?
The alternative is to water down the census questions, which also leads you down the same path (i.e. manure as data).
You can of course disagree about what what should actually be part of a transparent public record. (Though I suspect a lot of people post-date what was generally available in a "phone book.")
https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohi...
Representative Joyce Beatty is from Ohio and was instrumental in stopping Trump from illegally renaming the Kennedy Center.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-b...
Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.
It’s a census: it just asks questions.
If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.
I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined".
Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.
whatever1•18m ago