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.
The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.
and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form.
(1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full
First they came for…
You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?
You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people?
Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right?
"The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about.
It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.
Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse.
Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.
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.
Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.
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...
Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion.
Thanks.
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?
Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.
You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.
I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise.
I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse.
We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.
Intentionally damaging infrastructure is the recurring theme of this administration.
It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.
There is no question the end goal is data that can be abused, and anyone left who would protest their actions will be fired and replaced with more sycophants.
Handicap the public services if they are working well, then talk about how bad they are to justify for-profit replacement.
Or don’t and just exploit the gaps directly with better private data, whatever increases proximate wealth inequality.
That ideal became tantamount to enabling genocide when the US government breached the confidentiality of the census in order to prison camp the japanese on the basis of their race.
> I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity
It's not even just a question of "all". The state should have the absolute minimum capacity to carry out its necessary tasks. Collecting race (just to give one example of many) of any form is not absolutely necessary and so it should not be done.
> they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them
Because they may be in the future. -- but even that is too strong, the greatest harm perpetrated by state actors has consistently come from trying to "help" rather than intentionally malicious acts.
People only kill at a truly massive scale because they believe they are doing something good or at least necessary (even in war, but especially outside of war). This is why hoping states aren't evil isn't sufficient-- in fact it may induce mass murder, because what could be less evil than to Do the Right thing.
The universal cure is to distribute power and influence in as many ways as practicable, such that the damage from erroneous thinking is contained.
For any particular level of privacy, the banned methods can give you more accurate data. For any particular level of accuracy, the banned methods can give you better privacy.
The only way we're getting more accurate data is if the new rule causes them to largely abandon privacy. That would be bad. Harm for no benefit.
"What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .
Boy were the Germans happy to find these.
The American obsession with asking for people their perceived origins (AAPI, AA, Latino, ...) is more than weird: it's downright dangerous. Don't fucking ask these questions, and never, ever write it down, especially not with names.
Thankfully, now they can just buy it from data brokers and let Palantir target, so that makes life easier for them
1. How many people were living or staying in this house, apartment, or mobile home on April 1, 2020?
2. Were there any additional people staying here on April 1, 2020 that you did not include in Question 1?
3. Is this house, apartment, or mobile home?
4. What is your telephone number?
5. What is Person 1’s name?
6. What is Person 1’s sex?
7. What is Person 1’s age and what is Person 1’s date of birth?
8. Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?
9. What is Person 1’s race?
Nothing really stops you from lying either.
And race is a pretty big one under the current administration which has had hundreds of legal immigrants arrested for weeks to months off of "suspicion" that for lack of concrete evidence could only amount to racial profiling.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys.html
The American Community Survey is the most well-known, as it replaced the “long form” sampling that had been an extension to the Census.
no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.
https://www.congress.gov/94/statute/STATUTE-90/STATUTE-90-Pg...
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.
I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.
I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.
That seems to me like it's a good thing. Allow people to determine whether the data is actually needed, rather than closing their eyes.
I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.
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.
They do. After a substantial delay. Pretty handy for geneological research, while protecting privacy for the living.
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?
While this may be a reasonable stance in theory, there are many examples in reality where the danger has not materialized for decades. Personally, I have access to health records, birth certificates, and death certificates collected by a state. They contain very personal information. As far as I know, they have not been leaked to the general public.
This is one of those situations where everything you hear tells you the system is failing, but that's because nobody talks about the systems which haven't failed.
Besides, this possible failing of the Census' privacy promises shouldn't convince us that "If only we hadn't given info to the despotic and cruel government using it to target people, then we'd only have a despotic and cruel government hurting people randomly." The solution to this problem isn't to withhold info, it's to get rid of the despots.
The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality. I've grown very jaded now seeing all the things taken for granted in this country and lost or degraded recently with a whimper.
*: To be fair, they sent me specifically to places that didn't respond, so I was naturally led to believe that everyone in my region hated the government, ignored bizzarrely threatening fliers, or had recently moved and had no knowledge of the inhabitants (if any) during the census period.
Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from national opinion surveys based on tens of thousands of respondents, to small community surveys. A Census product with the most diverse participation pays off almost infinitely for America. It benefits everyone from national newspapers to rural counties.
If the smallest communities lose what little trust remains in the privacy of the Census, they have the most to lose in all of these ways.
And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.
The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power).
Amazing, innit.
Parties are not universally evil, when I malign them in this way it is in full acknowlegment that organization is the nearly singular path to "effect on target" as regards society-scale politics. What I mean is the party per se becomes a superorganism that has always as its first priority self-preservation (a la homeostasis) and it is very worth remembering this when subsuming oneself into their structure.
Countries conduct censuses so they can understand, in great detail, what is going on with the people who make up the country.
With this accurate information, improvement plans can be made, and life can be improved for everyone.
The comments about just making it a head count give a very interesting window into the mentality of many these days. They don’t want to - it can’t fathom how to - make life better.
It’s sad, really
Many countries use census data to target (or even round up and murder) specific groups of people by religion, ethnicity, etc.
Do you have evidence of this? Because I'd bet 90% Americans have no idea who Edward Snowden even is.
Other comments here about Germany and whatnot falls flat, and short. This is America, and part of it is being ok with your neighbors (unless they're truly insane and release plagues of rabbits or burn themselves out of their homes, but I digress), try to find some common ground even if it's awkward and you have to look the other way about some slights and trespasses.
I don't know how much trouble they went to to "fit" you to the cohort they tasked you with, or how much of a natural fit there was. Did you grow up / do you live in the area? There's an element of "liking" (Cialdini) each other which colors participants' perception of tasks. OTOH nothing like talking to perfect strangers to flex that muscle or find out you really don't have it.
> The census bureau decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census
and:
> The consequences will be dire for utility or for privacy, and possibly both. It's hard to understate this point: future statistical releases will either be useless compared to past ones, or they will be incredibly unsafe
so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.” and for the last census only we added some privacy items. but if we remove just one of those filters, we are in “dire” circumstances? but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.
this makes it feel like an emotional overblown problem
Privacy issues that weren’t possible before due to cost are now pennies to exploit. Also keep in mind as it points out people were using census data to drive gerrymandering efforts, so these attacks are real and have been going on for a long time.
One notable thing we have today that we didn't have 100 years ago is a computer. Before, you could reasonably assume that recreating individual records wasn't feasible, at least not on a large scale. You can't assume that now. A 4 digit password was safe for hundreds of years, but it would be a security lability today for the same reason.
(Also, linkage. There are more data sources to cross reference now with the internet and social media and web tracking and hacks - the record footprint of Americans even as recently as the 70s and 80s was dramatically lower!)
If you are choosing hundreds of years ago, when we had no computers and internet, I wonder how we had worse privacy than the surveillance world today.
> so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.”
Yes because we didn't have computers to unearth patterns in the data in a millisecond and politicians could have their career ended for doing the wrong thing, when revealed, instead of being rewarded for it.
No it is not an overblown problem.
It wasn't ok - it's been shown that the data released could individually identify people in releases before the 2010 Census.
Arguably the defaults for differential privacy are too robust but that is a different story.
I think he has it backwards here.
Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff.
I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people other than statisticians to confront the trade-off.
If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.
People are bad at making the tradeoff because they consistently underestimate the amount of information that is leaked. Forcing them to leak safe amounts of information is the right way.
Not sharing or collecting the data could in some cases be better but there is clear value in this data so the optimal amount to store and make public is not 0.
If there was an apocalyptic privacy breach that lead to 40% of the population losing their savings, people would be smashing their smart TVs in the streets a day later.
But alas, nothing bad actually manifests (besides the suspicious ads that know you really like Tide detergent).
By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible.
How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?
Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.
An argument about whether or not to deploy differential privacy on large statistical databases has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you give your address to have a package delivered. If you want the package delivered, you have to give your address.
On the other hand, it’s not at all clear that people should have to involuntarily, my force of law, offer up all sorts of personal details about their lives. And questions about whether the use of differential privacy can or should justify the collection of sensitive information are quite valid.
The census is justified by the idea that it will help us plan for the future. But the track record of central planning is poor to disastrous.
A small example: in theory population changes could inform land use decisions. In practice however, the ability of population to increase is softly capped by the amount of housing that exists, or will exist. If you restrict or frustrate housing, you will also restrict people from living where they want to live. Then the planners will point to the census data and tell you that nobody wants to live there and therefore there’s no need for change.
Ironically, if you wanted to measure where people want to live in order to get information for planning purposes, the number is right there and doesn’t require any personal data collection at all - it’s the price. (in this example $ per square foot of floor space). But in my experience people who like central planning don’t believe in prices so they ignore that and they look at their reams of personal data and they conclude that all is well in the world. It is hard for me to be sympathetic if one day folks like that had have less data to look at.
I am personally convinced that the reason noise infusion was banned was because powerful people were already reconstructing individual data from census for the purpose of gerrymandering, and they wanted to continue gerrymandering.
Once you've table voter preferences to actual street addresses you are no longer in the realm of "broad area cumulative averages and medians".
The only reason we ever started doing this was to track ex-slaves and their descendants, and after-1965 every other possible grouping of people started begging for a category that it could use to get government grants in some way.
The irony is that now, when censuses somehow desperately need to figure out if you're Armenian or not, they don't count the descendants of slaves at all, preferring to lump them in with every dark-skinned person of partial African descent, but sometimes not the Spanish speakers(?!).
The US Supreme Court made a good decision (on admissions, not on the need for the approval of redistricting maps in places that have continuously attacked slave and Jim Crow descended voters.) The government needs to get out of the race and religious science business. Elected and appointed officials are openly claiming jihadi eschatology as the reason that they're supporting Israel, and openly explaining how the culturally varied mix of people who happened to live in land that Zionists wanted, or the Chinese, are inhuman races that are a threat because of their inhuman behavior and their inhuman values. We've woven church and race deeply into the government again.
The idea that preferential admissions to elite schools was going to somehow offset slavery was laughable anyway. It was just a grievance engine that gave people on top an excuse to feel downtrodden during the one of the most and the first vulnerable times in their lives - when they find out they're too stupid or boring to get into the college they want. I've always been partial to the libertarian solution to the problem of US slavery - Murray Rothbard and others said that according to the Libertarian homesteading principle, slaves should have been awarded the land and the factories that they worked. That it was an injustice that would lead to (what was in his view) catastrophe, such as how the freeing of Russian serfs in 1861 without any of the land still controlled by their ex-masters led to the Russian Revolution 50 years later.
Seems like something that could be abused to achieve political objectives.
know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing.
If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.
I hope so. What are they?
I guess someone could fiddle with the noise, but then why not nudge the originals? Or more insidiously, control what is published?
Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.
That frankly sounds more like a failure of enforcement, on top of a failure of the construction of the financial system. Here in Germany, it is absolutely not a common thing that mortgages or the banks holding them get sold like a hot potato towards some other sucker, and thus such a letter would cause immediate suspicion.
It's a well-known trick, our notary warned us that these letters would come and we should scrutinize any invoice for a while. But they manage to skirt at the edge of legality
Some of that can be obfuscated through LLCs and trusts but some things are pretty much a matter of public record that not everyone agrees should be. More is doubtless available in some locales. I don't think property tax charges are public where I live though who knows if I asked the town clerk nicely. (Property taxes are at the town level where I live.)
I was a big fan of differential privacy but now I think it might be doing more harm than good, as I haven't seen a single case where it was applied successfully in a problem where it actually mattered, and it contributed strongly to discrediting and preventing a lot of work on other anonymization techniques as it was deemed the only way to preserve privacy by the research community, so showing up with enhancements to k-anonymity or any other noise mechanism not rooted in it was a sure way to get ridiculed and ignored. And it's just not a practical mechanism, even when it works for a single disclosure you always end up having to blow up the privacy budget to a ridiculous amount in order to keep disclosing statistics as otherwise you would for almost all real-world data run out of budget after a few publications.
So, for me it's a technique that works in the areas where it doesn't really matter (publishing highly aggregated statistics that pose almost zero privacy risk even without differential privacy) and doesn't work in other areas where it would actually matter (publishing fine-grained data about individuals or small groups). There are some niche use cases but in my view the privacy community has really overblown the importance of differential privacy by portraying it as the only way to reliably anonymize data.
BTW the German census bureau has an interesting approach to anonymization which they use for several decades already and so far I haven't heard of any cases of successful de-anonymization of the data, maybe the US bureau should have a look at that for their own needs.
As the article says anytime you want to enforce privacy, the data becomes somewhat less useful, there is just no way around that.
The point of rights is that we have them and that they should not be trampled upon when they become slightly inconvenient to someone in power.
1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8494446/?utm_source...
They weren't prepared for data that was obviously noisy. The data has always been inherently inaccurate, and folks just chose to ignore that previously
1: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fpandp.20191107&... 2: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abk3283?utm_sourc... 3: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/27150/chapter/14
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.")
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.
It is introduced in the public data, not the secret data.
Not sure exactly what you're proposing, but if the noise is added independently to different people, you can just buy multiple copies to reduce it.
There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why so much analysis has gone into differential privacy.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN98wmzisn4 (Excuse this poor quality, it was the only version I could find that wasn't tiktok)
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...
"...for the next 950 days"
because the next two years are going to become insanely miserable
in 950 days there will be several hundred warehouses concentrating over a million people in this country including many thousands of children costing a quarter trillion dollars (already funded)
and the Iran War will still be happening despite over a hundred declared "deals"
and the US will be running Cuba (forcing millions to return there)
statistical noise or the lack of it will be the least of our problems
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
The alternative is to water down the census questions, which also leads you down the same path (i.e. manure as data).
(Do you reject that? As someone who uses the phrase "counting illegals" I imagine you would be interested in knowing what that number is.)
It must therefore be maximally transparent. Do you want president Trump or palantir to decide on the "noise infusion" algorithm?
also, if how would anyone know how accurate the "transparent" number is? if Trump or Thiel can fuck with the fuzzing they can just as do so with the base data.
Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.
* I want to accurately report the finances of our company to the best of my ability.
* But that report would allow people to reconstruct private data about the terms of our contracts with various counterparties. I'd really like to avoid that, there's no rule that says we're supposed to release that data. In fact some of those contracts probably came with nondisclosure agreements!
* So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to calculate our results to the best of my ability, and then I'm going to add random values to them and report only the randomized ones. Any reconstruction people try to do will be wrong because of the randomness.
* If the SEC says "no, you need to report your actual numbers", I will explain to them that there's no such thing as an actual number because all data is noisy.
I can't get behind it.
In case you were wondering why the government would do this, yes, that's exactly why.
Science intrinsically ignores opinions.
The officials responsible for this smearing of data should be tried. This was a violation of the free speech clause as it coercively manipulated public beliefs. This was a crime against science and civil rights.
Eg via some app that instructs respondents to enter a specific answer in a pseudorandomly chosen question.
Of course security would be another question.
Do. The American Census Survey (randomly-selected long-form questionairre) is dangerously overinvasive.
Why even do a census if you're just going to synthesize random data as the last step?
I do surprising things with math on occasion, but I'm not a licensed statistician. I don't know what they do in private, but in public statisticians, or people trying to sound like them, seem to fool around with horseshoes and hand grenades a lot.
The Census Bureau doesn't just do the decennial census. For instance due to a convoluted jurisdictional dispute (near as I can tell), I ended up on the agricultural census for several years (until they figured out I wasn't trying to make a profit).
I have concerns about data privacy, but I'm more concerned with private entities trading in it and data integrity. I'm extremely concerned about the misuse of privately produced databases, especially by government functions. I get the impression that for a lot of folks the notion that private databases could be biased in the favor of the provider's interests in order to get favorable treatment from their customers or punish their detractors seems to be an "unknown unknown". We're veering into serious Dunning-Kruger territory attempting to use phone numbers, email addresses, and biometrics for identity / KYC. At this very moment the FCC is getting ready to order telecomms providers collect PII for people buying ALL phones, so they won't have any excuse not to sell that to all comers /s.
Private armies are regulated in the United States, and private data brokers should be similarly regulated for largely congruent reasons.
Never ever provide true information in any form.
Excessive obsession with equality is another thing that works to erase any cognitive abilities of the people to recognize differences in gender, race, age, culture etc. Equality is good to a reasonable extent but it shouldn't be forced to an extent to erase the cognitive capabilities gained through evolution.