Privacy invading Long Form Census is coming back

[Mr. Analog]

http://news.sciencemag.org/policy/2015/11/canada-expected-reinstate-mandatory-census?rss=1

Gotta keep those social scientists employed

[Thorin]

I'm not sure what to say about this - from the title of the post it looks like you think the mandatory long-form census is a bad thing ("privacy invading").

On the one hand, yes, the government is asking for a lot of data.  On the other hand, having lots of data allows the government to make better-informed decisions.  Making it mandatory means a lot higher level of compliance (the article says 90% versus 68%), and that means the data is much less likely to be skewed by certain groups being over-represented (for instance if it's not mandatory, maybe only upper-middle class or better will answer the survey, and so all the social problems will seem to revolve around the problems of the upper-middle and upper classes).

I happen to think this is a good thing, although there is still the spectre of private data being collected.  But Stats Canada appears to have good data protection policies and procedures, and stuff made public is always in an aggregate form (as a math and stats nerd I have spent a bit of time reading through their various publications).

[Tom]

I'm a little conflicted, but so long as most of the data isn't shared with any other agency, I'm ok with it if it improves policy decisions.

[Mr. Analog]

I would have no problem if it wasn't mandatory (y'know, like voting), but it is.

So your options are:
1. Do it like a good little robot (and of COURSE gov't security is TOP NOTCH... TOP)
2. Don't do it and face legal repercussions
3. Fudge it and face legal repercussions

I kind of HOPE that informed decision-making is actually the result of having a representative government in the first place. The dangers I see are the insistence on some fairly probing questions, how they are stored and the insane desire 3rd parties will have to get at this information at any cost.

This doesn't even touch on how social science can draw conclusions from data that may be politically sensitive and therefore wouldn't be acted upon as intended by the ruling government. Again, the public wouldn't have full access to the information collected so when the powers that be tell us that some contentious policy has to be changed based on numbers we aren't allowed to really probe how effective is it really going to be in policy making?

[Thorin]

Thing is, it wasn't mandatory for a while, and participation dropped so much that the data became suspect.

It's funny, I work with a trained psychometrician / statistician, and we recently talked about representative bias, basically the problem of one group being over-represented in a set of data and skewing the inferences made, and how the easiest way to reduce this skew was to gather more comprehensive stats.

I will say this, scientists in Canada for years have been complaining the government was trying to make them say certain political things instead of providing their findings in non-partisan ways.  Scientists now are speaking up saying that they expect they will get to be able to go back to non-partisan science.  At some point we have to put our faith in these scientists who pretty clearly don't want to be influenced by politicians, that they won't let the politicians influence them.

[Darren Dirt]

I'm a little conflicted, but so long as most of the data isn't shared with any other agency, I'm ok with it if it improves policy decisions.

...because data handled by civil servants NEVER gets stolen or intentionally leaked...

[Tom]

I'm a little conflicted, but so long as most of the data isn't shared with any other agency, I'm ok with it if it improves policy decisions.

...because data handled by civil servants NEVER gets stolen or intentionally leaked...

Slap it all in a computer, and don't let any one peon access to the raw data.

[Mr. Analog]

Either way we won't be able to verify their conclusions so we can't ever actually say the information that is being legally required of 20% of the population is actually used to make informed decisions without a leak or a whistle blower.

It smacks of government enforced plutocracy