Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective.

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.

> Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.

I don't understand your point here. Are you saying compliance isn't enforced?

As someone who got an ACS survey not long ago and had no interest in completing it, it certainly appears to be.

They can certainly enforce that you answer the survey. But it's very difficult to enforce a requirement that people answer questions accurately, particularly when they perceive that doing so will expose them to danger.

I don't get what danger is being referenced here that exists only if the data is released to the public (in aggregate)?

The government is the primary and arguably only source of the danger, and they already have most of the data whether you answer the ACS correctly or not.

There's not many cases of enforcement. Non-response is taken about as seriously as the Robinson–Patman act. I think the Census Bureau is very reliant on people thinking there will be enforcement, however, which is why the materials they send all have a threatening aura. I don't know about the ACS, but for the decennial census I often felt like my job as an enumerator was just to bother people until they'd answer. The case would keep being recycled until we got at least (IIRC) a head count.

It offers a mathematical description of a policy tradeoff, and the policy makers are apparently setting one of the parameters to zero.

> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. Maybe banning it is a way of pretending that the problem doesn't exist, in the hope that it will go away?

Or it's saying that one of these conflicting goals is more valuable than the other, and so shouldn't be sacrificed for it.

You can get about 2/3 as much output power for a given amount of waste heat and cooling capacity.

It's like how laptop power bricks used to be big and get hot, and now they aren't and don't.

Wasn't there news a bit ago about some people being suddenly excluded from Linux kernel development for presumably similar reasons?

There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".

That makes as much sense as having a licensing board for hammers or socket wrenches or welders.

> Fiddling with with climate controls and vents is not something I've done for 8 years now. Why is everybody always touching these things?

I'll set the temperature differently if it's cold vs hot out, and in some weather have to tell it to unfog the windshield.