Census time heightens privacy concerns
When a census worker visited Oliver Sarle's home in Warwick, R.I., the crusty farmer refused to answer a series of questions, including how much revenue his crops had generated the previous year and how many gallons of milk his cows had produced.
Sarle was charged with a misdemeanor: not answering questions posed by an official representative of the census. A Rhode Island judge sided with the government, ruling that the "information required by the statute to be collected must be assumed to be important and necessary for the public service."
The year was 1890, but the same sentiment is alive today. A similar distrust of government data collection, coupled with a wariness of the privacy and security threats raised by an extensive electronic compilation of personal data, has given rise to concerns about the procedures used in the 2010 census.
