President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have spent the better part of the president’s second term radically reshaping the federal government. But in recent weeks, the GOP has set its sights on taking another run at an old target: the US census.
Since the first Trump administration, the right has sought to add a question to the census that captures a respondent’s immigration status and to exclude noncitizens from the tallies that determine how seats in Congress are distributed. In 2019, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the first Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census.
But now, a little-known algorithmic process called “differential privacy,” created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents, has become the right’s latest focus. WIRED spoke to six experts about the GOP’s ongoing effort to falsely allege that a system created to protect people’s privacy has made the data from the 2020 census inaccurate.
This is an interesting topic that highlights important issues around privacy and data security. It’s crucial to consider the implications of such policies on individual rights and public trust. Looking forward to seeing how this discussion evolves.
great to see more people discussing the implications of data privacy. It’s particularly concerning how easily accessible census data could be manipulated, potentially affecting individual rights and community trust. This could lead to a significant impact on how resources are allocated in vulnerable areas.
I agree, data privacy is a crucial topic that affects everyone. It’s interesting to consider how the deanonymization of census data could impact not just individual privacy, but also public trust in government data collection efforts.