i have such a hard time reconciling stuff like this:
> 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
Believe it or not, mathematical techniques and computational power have increased in the past hundreds of years, not to mention the digitization of everything.
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.
Gerrymandering is most effective when you know exact voting patterns of each household so you can draw the lines to get the result you want. Differential privacy blurs those boundaries and provides more room for the partisan hacks to make a fatal mistake.
> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.
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.
Computers and improvements in data science/machine learning are basically the entire explanation. A LOT of the techniques that we use today to de-anonymize data require computation power not previously available. Even when doable, resources limited scale. Source: statistics degree
(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!)
> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.
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.
As the article clearly states, privacy features have been in the census since 1990. It is just that the previously used privacy feature was not very strong and could be defeated. So it was replaced by a stronger feature in 1920. Before 1990 the census. 1990 was when personal computers were being popularized and the computing power available to individuals exploded and so then it was possible to use computers to separate out individual information from the data the census publishes. So the issue came up then.
What don’t you understand? Those websites that defame a company are liable for that defamation. In this case Google defamed a company in its AI summary and is this liable for that defamation.
but if Wikipedia itself writes harmful content such as encouraging people to drink bleach, then wikipedia is liable. Google now generates its own content with AI, that defame others, so Google is liable.
And those tons of websites are liable for their misinformation. It's probably not worth suing some random blog because the author probably doesn't have money or lives in Russia. But Google has lots of money and a legal presence in almost every jurisdiction.
It's why people say "Donald Trump was held civilly liable for sexual assault in the E Jean Carroll case" instead of "Donald Trump raped E Jean Carroll"
we have a school system that rewards graduation and punishes punishment. our public school especially is geared around progressing the lowest common denominator forward at all costs. private schools can run how they want, public schools are paid to do 2 things: 1. get butts in seats 2. have kids move up when the year is over
This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.
Something something about metrics ceasing to be a good measure. Texas has draconian measures for districts containing a failing school, even as they redistribute the majority of funding from cities to rural districts. No surprise the schools want to pass by any means.
There are no resources for those who don’t progress, as there already aren’t enough teachers for the existing K-12 workload, and existing teachers are overloaded in the aggregate.
This is the failure mode of a system exceeding its capacity with no ability to apply back pressure. Slowly failing as gracefully as possible, eventually passing everyone.
Nguyen, T. D., Lam, C. B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages. AERA Open, 10.
The agreements that Anthropic/OpenAI are pretty general and there’s a lot of use cases they don’t meet.
The list of compliance standards that AWS meets is so big they have a separate product just to deliver the compliance documents. They basically do everything imaginable.
It’s not just that. Oftentimes contracts stipulate that the client’s data can’t be transferred across certain boundaries. If you have signed such an agreement, even sending the data to a service on the same cloud provider but in a different region could be a huge compliance violation.
there’s a top level feature in aws for investors to give out credits of like $120k of AWS spend during funding rounds. there’s min commits of spend for cheaper prices (RI). funneling costs and invoicing though aws has real benefits. aws spend monitoring is literally a sub industry with billion dollar players
The credits you get from aws in their startup program are typically not spendable on marketplace. At least what we got through YC we could not spend there. Not sure how claude is integrating, maybe it’s different here
there’s an interesting side to this that better cell coverage, starlink, and others have made burning man more phone friendly. purists will say don’t bring a phone. or the event only works because no one has phones that work
but the event isn’t possible to run without internet. DPW has wifi at every station. internet has become a core planning and organization tool
> 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
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