Give them no names, no numbers and no details.

No.They.Don’t.
Read the link I posted.
She did not stop coming to my house or calling my phone until her questions were answered.
She wasn’t nice, friendly, or considerate.

wrt urban planning, the localities could use traffic monitors and counters to determine when and how traffic is moving. Simply put a count box across all the roads in an area and on can tell how much traffic travels where.

Uncle’s category fits perfectly: Leviathan.

For the rest of the questions, the CB trained us to be pushy – but you could refuse to answer. Those questions are asked to generate useful statistics, and adding them to the Census is the cheapest way to get those statistics with minimal sampling error, but I see nothing in the Constitution that allows the feds to require an answer. Incidentally, in about six weeks of doing the follow-up sweep in a resort area in Michigan, I only had one refusal to fill out anything beyond the minimum. This was a guy who started off by belligerently asking what had happened to the forms he filled out in Florida. And I agreed with him, privately.

Obviously the CB has to maintain some sort of cadre on the payroll during the 9 years between official censuses, and sending them out to do surveys makes a lot more sense than putting them in an office to re-read the census manuals over and over again, but there shouldn’t be any legal requirement to answer the surveys.

With the possible exception of the Eskimo questions (and ironically that question was central to my “fraud” when I worked for them that summer) and the financial questions you can at least see how valuable the other questions are for urban planners don’t you? I mean that data is exceptionally valuable to civil engineers in urban planning. Same things with questions like how many toilets you have and so on. From a perspective of privacy these things seem outrageous, but anyone who has to make decisions on regional transportation, and planning this information is extremely valuable for good decision making, something that is increasingly in short supply.

And if you object on privacy grounds (and I have a lot of trouble with this myself so please don’t assume I am necessarily defending the government here, I’m simply suggesting that there is more then one way to look at the issue), how would you go about collecting this data? Are you suggesting that private companies hired by the government would be a better option, are you saying that the data should not be collected at all and planning be don on a “best guess” basis? I don’t know the answer myself but I think that it deserves more then a waive of the hand.

This, the ATFU, the TSA, mandatory everything, taxes and fees tacked on to phone, water, gas, electric, cell phones, parking tickets….

It’s over folks. Every canary is graveyard dead. Please don’t be insulting by calling this a free country.

They aren’t nice or friendly.
I didn’t know about the fines. That’s total BS.

My right to privacy should trump that need for information.

That said I am trying to figure out if I have posed about my experience working for the census that summer which really undermines the argument I have just presented, long story short, the quality control on data collection is dodgy at best and fraudulent at worse (and this is coming from someone who now admits, from the safety of statute of limitations, of perpetuating the fraud).

The data from the census is used as a demographic base in countless areas of research..