Two new concerns have arisen since the census of 2000, which prompted then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Republican, to suggest that Americans might want to skip questions they thought were prying. The first is a new mail-tracking system provided by the Post Office that can identify when individual census forms have been delivered and highlight when addresses have changed. Then there's the growing interest in what's called "re-identification," meaning extracting identities from anonymous data sets such as those released by the Census Bureau. Researchers have pulled off that sort of trick with data released by AOL and Netflix.
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