Scott Aaronson and Cynthia Dwork warn: a new order tells the Census to protect privacy like it's 1975 (scottaaronson.blog)
Their demonstration is a brewery: five aggregated statistics about beer-related businesses form a solvable system of equations that recovers individual firms' employee counts, even after careful rounding. Coarsening, they argue, loses usefulness AND fails at privacy — the worst of both.
The thread added context and doubt. A Stanford CS voice noted 2020 was the first census to use differential privacy, that lawsuits question its constitutionality, and that citizenship status could be inferred by cross-referencing products. A practitioner just sighed that an interesting technology had gone political.
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