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.
Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.
That’s one reason Xoom Info was able to sell for a billion dollars and even their data has a lot of junk
Having well curated detailed census data would be a major boon for the data brokers
> You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?
I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal.
Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-...
Not everybody uses it and not everybody who uses it uses it naively enough to give access to useful identity info.
What's shocking is how people keep finding excuses. "what about Meta" is not one
anyway let's stop whatabouting:) we are talking about census
Cell tower data, credit bureau integration, social media scraping, palantir, smart home device surveillance, DNA database exploitation, facial recognition networks, tax, payroll, passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases and many more...
The census is a historical relic used to jerrymander congressional seats, and that's about it.
Eg
> Cell tower data
That's just going to get you a subscriber and device ID, unless you're talking about going deep packet inspection and parsing the contents of the packets. You could, but that's a lot of effort to get something the census can hand you for free.
> credit bureau integration
Notoriously unreliable and identities for the purpose of credit get stolen constantly. The easiest way to clean that is against known-good info, like the census.
> social media scraping
Half the profiles are fake, also not reliable data unless you clean it up. Again, census data makes it very easy to cut out profiles that don't match a real person.
> tax, payroll
These are probably fairly reliable, although they usually won't tell you about a person's demographics.
> passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases
There's an enormous part of the population that won't appear in these at all. The huge part of the country that's "working poor" but not poor enough for Medicaid probably aren't traveling internationally. I wouldn't be surprised if half the country doesn't appear in any of these.
The census has value in that it contains a huge depth of information, is tied with your identity, citizens are compelled by law to answer so even the privacy folks have to respond and lying on it is a crime (enforcement is probably non-existent, though).
I'm sure that can all be reconstructed to some level of accuracy given sufficient effort, but that's a lot harder and requires a ton more coordination than "SELECT * FROM census_data WHERE ..."
I'm all for keeping all of this data private. But to think it isn't already available is a bit 'head in sand'. Maybe put laws in place for 'general' privacy across all data, before getting too inflamed about Census in particular.
