Comment Re:That's not how it works (Score 1) 47
The Census site has a little info about this: http://www.census.gov/privacy/data_protection/statistical_safeguards.html
But more relevant is this link to the American Statistical Association, which goes into significant depth on the techniques used to protect confidentiality: http://www.amstat.org/committees/pc/index.html
On this page http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/spwp22.html we find a working paper from the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, which has deeper details on actual operations.
From that page, the "Statistical Disclosure Limitation: A Primer" document has an interesting section defining inferential disclosure - "occurs when individual information can be inferred with high confidence from statistical properties of the released data."
And the "Current Federal Statistical Agency Practices" describes the multi-dimensional linear programming used to prevent that, along with other techniques including geographic thresholds, population thresholds and coarsening.
So the summary is: Yes, it is a serious issue to be concerned about, but Census is taking it seriously, applying some real science and math to it, and it looks like they are doing a good job.