The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.
Imprisonment? deportation? these are petty things.
The serious danger is polarization and radicalization, turning people against each other, suppressing voices of reason. The ensuing chaos could help pull off another January 6th, only successful. Gerrymandering is one approach, but with more detailed data more interesting things may become possible.
Alternative take that was expressed in the other post on this: census data users found DP extremely hard to work with, and viewed it as an imposed solution from the ivory tower. I wonder if any user could chime in on this.
Doesn't this mean such data analysis can be used by anyone against anyone else? This does not just mean one political group can do this analysis, any political group or foreign power can make use of the data if it is not protected using differential privacy. Has the military weighed in on this? Seems like the data could be used to attack police forces, cities, states, demographic groups, groups of almost any kind. It could be used to identify military forces, say those at secret bases. Turning off the privacy protections seems like tearing down a fence; makes it easier to take your horse out for a ride, but also makes it easier for the wolves to get in.
> so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please
You mean like by race, gender, and sexual orientation, and using statistical analysis to portray a group of oppressors vs. oppressed, perpetrators and victims? Exactly what was happening via official public policy for the last 4 years while the progressives cheered it on?
All I'm asking is that we be consistent in our outrage.
If you don't like what's happening now, I understand that point of view. But to pretend it didn't happen already is mind boggling.
If for some reason you don't think 2020-2024 were a social morass of slicing up people by their "identity", and in many cases were in fact made official public policy by way of signed executive orders (you can google them, I'm not your personal researcher), then I don't know what planet you were living on during that time.
