Coursening is not as elegant as differential privacy. But using coursening is not a "privacy emergency", it is a very-slightly-less-accurate census. And no one knows what the actual economic impacts of this level of accuracy difference are.
I would love to see the more elegant techniques used, and also have the intuition that this is bad policy, but I don't see the "emergency" here. Labeling it as such just histrionic to me.
> Edit: Changed this from email because email validation is a can of worms as an example
Email honestly seems much more straightforward than dates... Sweden had a Feb 30 in 1712, and there's all sorts of date ranges that never existed in most countries (e.g. the American colonies skipped September 3-13 in 1752).
Why not have a conversation instead of downvoting. What did I say is wrong?
Your second paragraph is implying that the half of Americans who voted for Trump are "bad Americans". That seems to be sowing the division that your first paragraph warns against (even if it is a reason to dislike Trump).
I don't think either democrats or republicans can claim the moral high ground about sowing division.
I would love to see the more elegant techniques used, and also have the intuition that this is bad policy, but I don't see the "emergency" here. Labeling it as such just histrionic to me.