Someone pointed me to this article by Ron Paul. Curious and still a bit disbelieving, I googled. Hunh. The American Community Survey does exist, and it is scary.
Answering it, if they ask you to, is apparently compulsory. Just take a look at the list of questions in the various PDF files. Gah.
Fascinating. I was hoping you’d offer some comparison to living under communist dictatorship and how similar this sort of thing is.
All I can say is that I’m glad I’m Canadian. There is a longer census survey, but it is voluntary, and the questions are largely financial in nature.
That’s really something. I have to confess that 1) I couldn’t answer all of those questions about myself because I am missing some information about the age and value of the house I live in, for instance; and 2) confronted with this kind of crap, I would be strongly, strongly inclined to make up interesting lies. But obviously that’s not a productive long-term solution.
Cam – to clarify: this isn’t the U.S. census. It’s a different survey. The census, from what I understand, remains voluntary.
Hi Vika (waves).
I was just trying to come up with something similar to what you described in referring to the Canadian census–there are two versions of it, one quite short, the other longer.
Isn’t it wild that the census, which is somewhat innocuous and also constitutional, is voluntary, while this horrible invasion of privacy is not?
Ok, I haven’t read the question list, but actually, I’m not all that opposed to something like this, *IF* it is really truly absolutely never tied to personally identifiable information. I think it’s not a bad idea for the government to have data to draw on to learn about the income, housing, education, vocation, and even sexual choices of its constituants (in aggregate, never at an individual level). Want to deny civil rights to gay people? That gets trickier if you’ve got data showing that 10% of your district identifies that way. Wondering what effect a take hike on the top-earning 5% will have on your area? Look at the income data to see what percentage will be affected.
“believe me when I tell you we know who you are
information (in formation), violation, g.o.d.”
— Pitchshifter, “G(atherer).O(f).D(ata)”