The 2020 census will attempt to collect personal information from more than 300 million people across the country. But a government watchdog report released this month has concerns about the U.S. Census Bureau’s ability to do that.
This year’s census is the first where it will be mostly conducted online.
“It’s ripe for both direct attacks from hackers around the world to try to understand the U.S. population,” says Brendan Saltaformaggio, a professor at Georgia Tech. “And it’s also a big risk to just regular people because it poses a nice way of trying to trick people into giving away information the census wouldn’t normally ask for.”
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