The 2018 Census

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#1971691 9-Mar-2018 10:56

DaveB:

networkn:

I have an idea, not sure if it's better to be it's own thread, however; Can anyone come up with between 1-3 better/additional questions, they could have asked that might have provided better insights into either the current state of NZ, or what might be useful in predicting resource usage for the future?

1. What sex were you when you were born?

Male OR Female

2. How do you identify yourself today?

Male OR Female OR Transgender OR Confused OR Non of the above

3. How would you like to be identified in the future?

Male OR Female OR Transgender OR Still Confused OR Mind your own business

question 1 should also potentially contain both as there are medical conditions where it is both .... thus the push by lbqt to get changes.

nunz

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#1971709 9-Mar-2018 11:18

DaveB:

MikeAqua:

floydbloke:

Seems to me there’s a lot of preciousness, combined with the usual media hype, about extreme minorities' or individuals' situations having been excluded from the questions.........

The male female question seem largely irrelevant to me. For planning purposes it can be assumed to be 50:50. More likely that the info is used for gender issues.

I have highlighted some important words here, but at the end of the day MikeAqua possibly points at the real question to be asked. Issues is the word here. How many people have an issue with their gender? Is it 0.5%, 1% or more. Do the other 99% really care? And of that 0.5% or 1% or even 10%, how much is this driven by social media wannabes?

We have always had majority and minority (and then the REAL minority). Totally irrelevant in my view and a waste of tax payer money trying to make sense of it.

Yes it is precious - one of my favourite scenes is from Shameless (USA Version) where the gay son is invited to a cafe type setting and introduced to a table full of gender aware people. The my personal pronoun, i am and identify as introductions were hilarious considering how much difficulty most people have with remembering a few names. it drove home for me how silly it is to define oneself by a small part of the whole person.

But - however smlal a stat it is it is having an impact all out of proportion to its size. My primary school aged daughter is being forced to consider and deal with gender neutral toilets and a raft of toher changes coming into schools, sex ed etc -Knowing what percentage, however small, gives a bit of rational balance to the sea of populist diatribe out in the newspapers nad media now days. Gay / Lesbian / and every other letter of the alphabet are hugely represented in the media and entertainment. Knowing how many are actually affected, even if it is an elmination by share tinyness of the population, is important to get some perspective on these things.

A negative or nil or miniscule result is a statistically significant result in decision making.

As a example - in India the male / female ration changed from 49/51 to 50:50 or 51/49. It showed a major influence of sex biased abortions with girls getting killed in favour of sons - numbering in the 10's of thousands or more.

MikeAqua

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#1973013 12-Mar-2018 10:55

freitasm: No, it does not. Also it is against the TOS to link personal identifying data to Google Analytics records.

Setting aside google analytics, I'm still curious about background links to GoogleAds and DoubleClick. What functionality do they add to a census site that doesn't have adds?

Mike

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#1973015 12-Mar-2018 10:56

Those I can't explain...

MikeAqua

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#1973257 12-Mar-2018 14:35

freitasm:

Those I can't explain...

People have lodged OIA requests on the subject. Of course we won't see the answers for quite some time.

Mike

nunz

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#1973322 12-Mar-2018 15:55

MikeAqua:

freitasm: No, it does not. Also it is against the TOS to link personal identifying data to Google Analytics records.

Setting aside google analytics, I'm still curious about background links to GoogleAds and DoubleClick. What functionality do they add to a census site that doesn't have adds?

Considering GA gives you lots of clever break down as to operating systems used, platforms used, mobile / pc / desktop stats, ip locations, parts of the country and potentially other demographics to do with gender / age / location etc - it might have been seen as a good way to gather who did what and how with the first online stats.

Ideally that would have been written as an inhouse part of the system but GA is pretty informative and also allows aggregation of other metadata that might not be available to a home built visitor stats system (e.g. they can gather info across sites and also add info allowed to be given by signed up google users).

It might also get around some of the issues of not leaving traces behind for privacy reasons. E.g. Stats cant leave cookies or other traces to ensure absolute privacy between multiple users of the same pc, google however has no such restraints. If some one had to re-log on to complete the form in two stages - stats couldn't tell that as no saved data on the machine, but google can. visitors and hits and unique platforms data is possible via GA.

Double click is part of google. it ends up as part of GA or other google stuff.

MikeAqua

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#1973377 12-Mar-2018 16:01

This raises an important issue. You don't simply decide to trust StatsNZ when you do your census online, you are also deciding to trust google. Potentially, with all sorts of personal info that the census form collects.

Mike

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Trade NZ and US shares and funds with Sharesies (affiliate link).

DaveDog

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#1973398 12-Mar-2018 16:30

MikeAqua:

This raises an important issue. You don't simply decide to trust StatsNZ when you do your census online, you are also deciding to trust google. Potentially, with all sorts of personal info that the census form collects.

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

DaveB

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#1973443 12-Mar-2018 18:05

DaveDog:

MikeAqua:

This raises an important issue. You don't simply decide to trust StatsNZ when you do your census online, you are also deciding to trust google. Potentially, with all sorts of personal info that the census form collects.

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

Salary and Employer.

tdgeek

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#1973456 12-Mar-2018 18:36

DaveB:

DaveDog:

MikeAqua:

This raises an important issue. You don't simply decide to trust StatsNZ when you do your census online, you are also deciding to trust google. Potentially, with all sorts of personal info that the census form collects.

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

Salary and Employer.

No issue. Its just a number, its anonymised. Imagine if there was no census. People complain that certain services or problems aren't dealt with as the Govt has to wait till the problem exists. Why not foresee trends and bud it in the nip???

DaveDog

336 posts

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#1973457 12-Mar-2018 18:39

DaveB:

DaveDog:

MikeAqua:

This raises an important issue. You don't simply decide to trust StatsNZ when you do your census online, you are also deciding to trust google. Potentially, with all sorts of personal info that the census form collects.

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

Salary and Employer.

Employer is probably easily to find online anyway of most people (LinkedIn for example, Facebook etc) not to mention presence on some employer sites... Salary perhaps...

tdgeek

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#1973458 12-Mar-2018 18:45

DaveDog:

DaveB:

DaveDog:

MikeAqua:

This raises an important issue. You don't simply decide to trust StatsNZ when you do your census online, you are also deciding to trust google. Potentially, with all sorts of personal info that the census form collects.

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

Salary and Employer.

Employer is probably easily to find online anyway of most people (LinkedIn for example, Facebook etc) not to mention presence on some employer sites... Salary perhaps...

Easily gettable by the Govt who also runs the census, but this is the first "real" online census, so it seems to me they need this info and version 1.0 they play safe. They may already have sourced this from IRD and want a sanity check for next time. Its a conservative approach if I am right, and thats fair enough.

DaveB

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#1973488 12-Mar-2018 19:16

I must admit, I was a little bemused when I completed the income side. It only came up with one of my businesses! Maybe if I was asked to answer about a business that I have worked at and made a loss, it may have been a bit more relevant. As you say, version 1.

MikeAqua

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#1973813 13-Mar-2018 10:20

DaveDog:

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

Home and work address, salary, DOB, full name.

In the right hands, no issue. In the wrong hands, very usable for identity fraud and all sorts of mischief.

So ... do we trust google?

Mike

nunz

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#1973817 13-Mar-2018 10:29

MikeAqua:

DaveDog:

It might just be me - but I don't see the information gathered as that particularly invasive... I can't remember if they collected Salary info (was it only a week ago!) but that would be about the most sensitive thing they could ask.

Home and work address, salary, DOB, full name.

In the right hands, no issue. In the wrong hands, very usable for identity fraud and all sorts of mischief.

So ... do we trust google?

GA doesn't collect what is on the form - only stats about the page visit - e.g. how long on page, next page visited, browser used, device types - all the form info is not touched by google. The code for sending data to GA is open sourced in that anyone can view it here:

<s c r i p t async src='https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js'></s c r i p t>

From google.

What data does the tracking snippet capture?

When you add either of these tracking snippets to your website, you send a pageview for each page your users visit. Google Analytics processes this data and can infer a great deal of information including:

The total time a user spends on your site.
The time a user spends on each page and in what order those pages were visited.
What internal links were clicked (based on the URL of the next pageview).

In addition, the IP address, user agent string, and initial page inspection analytics.js does when creating a new tracker is used to determine things like the following:

The geographic location of the user.
What browser and operating system are being used.
Screen size and whether Flash or Java is installed.
The referring site.

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