Twenty years ago I would've said the trick is to get people to believe it's a National Defense issue. But it seems like after the degradations of the Bush years, when we asked the army to do more of almost everything without really funding the new civilian-ish functions, even the Pentagon and the VA have problems with the most basic record-keeping issues. :-/
"lead pipes" per 100,000 people? What counts as a "lead pipe"? A "pipe" isn't a useful fundamental unit. Is a 100' water supply line from the meter to the house a single pipe? Is the 20" supply from the wall to the faucet a single pipe? Are they equally dangerous?
It seems a little odd to me to associate that practice with privacy. I don't tweet, but if I could wipe all my communications from the internet once a year or something I think it'd be great! My thinking and opinions evolve over time. Also I've said a lot of things that I now think are just wrong. I'd maintain a one true source of my current opinions and people could refer to that.
As a new homeowner, I only recently discovered that anyone who knows your address can easily find out how much you paid for your house. To me that's roughly equal in sensitivity to income information. But somehow one is a big secret that the IRS has to protect with anonymization and special access procedures that make the data a huge pain to use for research, and the other is three clicks away on Zillow.
We have some big contradictions in how we think about privacy ...
IMO house prices are much less sensitive than the information the IRS has.
> To me that's roughly equal in sensitivity to income information.
Even if you know the house purchase price, you don't know the incomes of each spouse or even the rough proportions. Nor do you know how much help the owners may have gotten on the purchase from previous real estate gains or from parents, children, or other acquaintances.
So while there's probably a decent correlation between house purchase price and income in the aggregate, knowing the purchase price in a specific situation doesn't really offer much concrete knowledge about the income or the net worth of the owners.
Some days I wonder if you are really thinking clearly about stuff. Especially when it comes to things with significant political implications on what data the government shall have. Right now I am wondering how many staunch conservatives are outraged by the idea that the government should know they went and got vaccinated but don't want anyone to know. Especially the federal government. Crazy maybe but that is politics.
When it comes to lead pipes I think you seriously underestimate how hard it would be to find them. When such plumbing was grandfathered in a lot of lines were replaced over the years. But no one kept records of who had what. You'd literally have to test individual homes in vast numbers to find out who still has it installed. And that data would be of little use statistically.
The HIPAA privacy regime was created with one goal: to keep (ostensibly) straight people from being embarrassed by a public HIV diagnosis. That's it. That was the whole goal. It really doesn't make any sense in the current context, and in a functioning democracy, the legislature would go back and rejigger the rules to ban the things we don't want (Target sending ad flyers to people they know are pregnant through surveillance) and allow things we do want (parents to be able to get their child's PCR test result without needing a doctor to break the rules by pushing the release info button, for a personal example). Alas.
Things like this are why McConnell is a genius to try and run on absolutely zero policy substance. Americans don't want the government to do anything because the government is messing up everything it tries to do!
I used to just blame this on Republicans (and it is still largely their fault) but at some point the party of expanding government needs to take responsibility for improving government. Through COVID, in particular, the US Government has seen a MASSIVE erosion in state capacity that shows no signs of being mitigated. It doesn't even really seem like anyone cares. I can't blame that on Mitch McConnell.
My wife used to work in real property management for the government. I asked her once how long a permit should take if everyone actually did their jobs (a rare occurrence) , and you cut the red tape but still protected the environment etc. She said "one or two months"
I then asked how long it actually takes "1 to 2 years"
There are some good people in the government. But there are also a LOT of people just collecting paychecks and trying to do as little as possible. And there's also a lot of red tape that serves no useful purpose. Except it allows the people trying to do no work to put up roadblocks. So they don't actually have to do anything.
A large part of the problem is the government protections that make it almost impossible to fire employees. For example, even after being convicted in state court for sexual assault that occurred on the job, the government employee kept his.
Government is too big and too important to be this incompetent.
Look to the states, then. NY, NJ, CA, MI, IL are definitely not well-run. MA is pretty good, but they've had split leadership between legislature and governor for quite a while. At the city level - Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, SF - it is even worse.
I lived in Indiana during Mitch Daniels tenure as Governor, and it was pretty well-run. Florida's version of the DMV is also good. Admittedly, both states don't have the expansive network of programs the states mentioned above have...but that is a feature, not a bug.
I wouldn't call antivaxxers 'rights-respecting'. They are rights asserters who do not believe their rights should be curtailed even in trivial ways to protect other people's rights--and pro-vaxxers do have a right to access public areas without being subjected to risk needlessly being imposed upon them by others who simply refuse to acknowledge the pro-vaxxers have rights that are affected by the antivaxxers decision not to vaccinate. The antivaxxers are not pro-rights, they are pro-themselves, period.
The notion that the government is good at this is an inherent fallacy of your argument. In a past life I was a senior financial executive at fortune 500 companies. As all companies do, we got various quarterly surveys from the government, especially the commerce and labor departments, and the questions were largely non-nonsensical and betrayed a lack of understanding on how the economy actually works. There was no way that you could construct good public policy from what was asked.
Let me suggest that this is not the action of someone who is vastly unconcerned with the general notion that there might be career or social consequences to people being able to rifle through your history.
It's kind of hard to say what parts of your personal life are and aren't likely to come back to haunt you, and it's by no means crazy to want to be conservative with what you leave around to find (I assume this is part of the calculus that Matt uses to delete *everything*, not just takes he finds retrospectively suspect).
Now, on the other hand, it's only getting easier to surveil people, and at some point I do think we need an approach to privacy that's not just trying to hold back the tide. But I'm not sure that blithe dismissal of privacy concerns is it.
I agree with this take. I'd also point out that the downsides of lack of commercial privacy is usually capped at identity theft, while the downsides lack of government privacy is going to jail. (there is evidence that governments are buying commercial data, so this line is getting less distinct - but at least you can opt not to participate in a lot of commercial activity)
I live in Wisconsin. As I write this, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services vaccine dashboard has a note reading:
"*As of November 2, 2021, children ages 5-11 are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. DHS is working to integrate data on vaccinations in the 5-11 age group into the COVID-19 Vaccines for Wisconsin Residents dashboard and will make that data available as soon as possible."
I don't have kids, but I cannot emphasize how freaking frosty I would feel if I were trying to understand the health risks my young children faced at school when, in our declared state of emergency, people can't get a database updated in a *month*. My faith in such declarations is not enhanced by this lackadaisical ineptitude.
(and it's not as if 5-11 approval appeared on 11/2 as some existential shock to the system, we knew this was coming further months in advance)
This is really great, Matt! Privacy concerns also block inter-agency information sharing, and then they enter into bizarre and incomplete MOUs are created to 'share what we can'.
But the claim that no one is counting cannot be overstated. In Virginia, for example, the best eviction data we have is from an academic institution who has an unpaid intern pull the numbers from the court records. Due to the scale, the data is only regional. To the point of the article, eviction data is registered twice already by statute and we don't care to count; one being the court documentation mentioned, but another by sheriff's when they place a notice of eviction.
In my own experience, the government's incompetence is limitless. I served on active duty in the army for three years and I am currently in the NJ National Guard. On active duty many of our vehicles would not start or could not be driven for another reason. People pretended to train more than we actually trained. Our facilities were left to degrade, basic maintenance just wasn't done. Money flowed down the drain in an unimaginable way. In the NJ Guard, I signed a contract promising a bonus for a three year contract. I was supposed to be paid one half the sum (less taxes) in May of 2020 and the second Half in April 2021. I have not received even the first payment. I am consistently told "they are working on it" and "it is coming soon". Incredibly frustrating.
you managed to depress me while telling me stuff I didn't know. Well-done!
Twenty years ago I would've said the trick is to get people to believe it's a National Defense issue. But it seems like after the degradations of the Bush years, when we asked the army to do more of almost everything without really funding the new civilian-ish functions, even the Pentagon and the VA have problems with the most basic record-keeping issues. :-/
Why is that lead pipe graphic so bad?
"lead pipes" per 100,000 people? What counts as a "lead pipe"? A "pipe" isn't a useful fundamental unit. Is a 100' water supply line from the meter to the house a single pipe? Is the 20" supply from the wall to the faucet a single pipe? Are they equally dangerous?
If Matt finds privacy concerns so ridiculous, why does he auto-delete all of his old tweets? Just curious
It seems a little odd to me to associate that practice with privacy. I don't tweet, but if I could wipe all my communications from the internet once a year or something I think it'd be great! My thinking and opinions evolve over time. Also I've said a lot of things that I now think are just wrong. I'd maintain a one true source of my current opinions and people could refer to that.
As a new homeowner, I only recently discovered that anyone who knows your address can easily find out how much you paid for your house. To me that's roughly equal in sensitivity to income information. But somehow one is a big secret that the IRS has to protect with anonymization and special access procedures that make the data a huge pain to use for research, and the other is three clicks away on Zillow.
We have some big contradictions in how we think about privacy ...
IMO house prices are much less sensitive than the information the IRS has.
> To me that's roughly equal in sensitivity to income information.
Even if you know the house purchase price, you don't know the incomes of each spouse or even the rough proportions. Nor do you know how much help the owners may have gotten on the purchase from previous real estate gains or from parents, children, or other acquaintances.
So while there's probably a decent correlation between house purchase price and income in the aggregate, knowing the purchase price in a specific situation doesn't really offer much concrete knowledge about the income or the net worth of the owners.
I think, in the aggregate, there's going to be a very close correlation between home prices and household income.
Some days I wonder if you are really thinking clearly about stuff. Especially when it comes to things with significant political implications on what data the government shall have. Right now I am wondering how many staunch conservatives are outraged by the idea that the government should know they went and got vaccinated but don't want anyone to know. Especially the federal government. Crazy maybe but that is politics.
When it comes to lead pipes I think you seriously underestimate how hard it would be to find them. When such plumbing was grandfathered in a lot of lines were replaced over the years. But no one kept records of who had what. You'd literally have to test individual homes in vast numbers to find out who still has it installed. And that data would be of little use statistically.
1. Good data are critical for effective policy making and execution
2. The bias of government should always tend toward protecting privacy
3. To act against #2 should require strict scrutiny of the aim and intended outcome of using private information
#3 would seem to assume we have decided what the scope of power is for each level of government. But we haven’t.
That's something that could be litigated in court though couldn't it?
If it passed the legal "strict scrutiny" test in court that would probably work
It’s often a purely political question.
The HIPAA privacy regime was created with one goal: to keep (ostensibly) straight people from being embarrassed by a public HIV diagnosis. That's it. That was the whole goal. It really doesn't make any sense in the current context, and in a functioning democracy, the legislature would go back and rejigger the rules to ban the things we don't want (Target sending ad flyers to people they know are pregnant through surveillance) and allow things we do want (parents to be able to get their child's PCR test result without needing a doctor to break the rules by pushing the release info button, for a personal example). Alas.
Any suggested reading on why HIPAA was created?
Angels in America.
Oregon actually has a pretty solid set of COVID-19 data that I find credible and useful. Sure, there are a few issues but nothing huge: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/oregon.health.authority.covid.19/viz/OregonsCOVID-19DataDashboards-TableofContents/TableofContentsStatewide
Things like this are why McConnell is a genius to try and run on absolutely zero policy substance. Americans don't want the government to do anything because the government is messing up everything it tries to do!
I used to just blame this on Republicans (and it is still largely their fault) but at some point the party of expanding government needs to take responsibility for improving government. Through COVID, in particular, the US Government has seen a MASSIVE erosion in state capacity that shows no signs of being mitigated. It doesn't even really seem like anyone cares. I can't blame that on Mitch McConnell.
My wife used to work in real property management for the government. I asked her once how long a permit should take if everyone actually did their jobs (a rare occurrence) , and you cut the red tape but still protected the environment etc. She said "one or two months"
I then asked how long it actually takes "1 to 2 years"
There are some good people in the government. But there are also a LOT of people just collecting paychecks and trying to do as little as possible. And there's also a lot of red tape that serves no useful purpose. Except it allows the people trying to do no work to put up roadblocks. So they don't actually have to do anything.
A large part of the problem is the government protections that make it almost impossible to fire employees. For example, even after being convicted in state court for sexual assault that occurred on the job, the government employee kept his.
Government is too big and too important to be this incompetent.
Look to the states, then. NY, NJ, CA, MI, IL are definitely not well-run. MA is pretty good, but they've had split leadership between legislature and governor for quite a while. At the city level - Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, SF - it is even worse.
I lived in Indiana during Mitch Daniels tenure as Governor, and it was pretty well-run. Florida's version of the DMV is also good. Admittedly, both states don't have the expansive network of programs the states mentioned above have...but that is a feature, not a bug.
It is going to take them 3-6 months to process my passport, which I would have thought is in the first category.
I wouldn't call antivaxxers 'rights-respecting'. They are rights asserters who do not believe their rights should be curtailed even in trivial ways to protect other people's rights--and pro-vaxxers do have a right to access public areas without being subjected to risk needlessly being imposed upon them by others who simply refuse to acknowledge the pro-vaxxers have rights that are affected by the antivaxxers decision not to vaccinate. The antivaxxers are not pro-rights, they are pro-themselves, period.
The notion that the government is good at this is an inherent fallacy of your argument. In a past life I was a senior financial executive at fortune 500 companies. As all companies do, we got various quarterly surveys from the government, especially the commerce and labor departments, and the questions were largely non-nonsensical and betrayed a lack of understanding on how the economy actually works. There was no way that you could construct good public policy from what was asked.
Matt regularly deletes his Twitter history.
Let me suggest that this is not the action of someone who is vastly unconcerned with the general notion that there might be career or social consequences to people being able to rifle through your history.
It's kind of hard to say what parts of your personal life are and aren't likely to come back to haunt you, and it's by no means crazy to want to be conservative with what you leave around to find (I assume this is part of the calculus that Matt uses to delete *everything*, not just takes he finds retrospectively suspect).
Now, on the other hand, it's only getting easier to surveil people, and at some point I do think we need an approach to privacy that's not just trying to hold back the tide. But I'm not sure that blithe dismissal of privacy concerns is it.
I agree with this take. I'd also point out that the downsides of lack of commercial privacy is usually capped at identity theft, while the downsides lack of government privacy is going to jail. (there is evidence that governments are buying commercial data, so this line is getting less distinct - but at least you can opt not to participate in a lot of commercial activity)
I would ban the government's from buying commercial data.
I would also ban government use of facial recognition software, license plate readers, and other forms of government mass surveillance.
I live in Wisconsin. As I write this, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services vaccine dashboard has a note reading:
"*As of November 2, 2021, children ages 5-11 are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. DHS is working to integrate data on vaccinations in the 5-11 age group into the COVID-19 Vaccines for Wisconsin Residents dashboard and will make that data available as soon as possible."
I don't have kids, but I cannot emphasize how freaking frosty I would feel if I were trying to understand the health risks my young children faced at school when, in our declared state of emergency, people can't get a database updated in a *month*. My faith in such declarations is not enhanced by this lackadaisical ineptitude.
(and it's not as if 5-11 approval appeared on 11/2 as some existential shock to the system, we knew this was coming further months in advance)
This is really great, Matt! Privacy concerns also block inter-agency information sharing, and then they enter into bizarre and incomplete MOUs are created to 'share what we can'.
But the claim that no one is counting cannot be overstated. In Virginia, for example, the best eviction data we have is from an academic institution who has an unpaid intern pull the numbers from the court records. Due to the scale, the data is only regional. To the point of the article, eviction data is registered twice already by statute and we don't care to count; one being the court documentation mentioned, but another by sheriff's when they place a notice of eviction.
In my own experience, the government's incompetence is limitless. I served on active duty in the army for three years and I am currently in the NJ National Guard. On active duty many of our vehicles would not start or could not be driven for another reason. People pretended to train more than we actually trained. Our facilities were left to degrade, basic maintenance just wasn't done. Money flowed down the drain in an unimaginable way. In the NJ Guard, I signed a contract promising a bonus for a three year contract. I was supposed to be paid one half the sum (less taxes) in May of 2020 and the second Half in April 2021. I have not received even the first payment. I am consistently told "they are working on it" and "it is coming soon". Incredibly frustrating.
"In my own experience, the government's incompetence is limitless"
This is my own experience as well. I would also add there's a large amount of laziness