> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore.

I think he has it backwards here.

Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff.

I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people other than statisticians to confront the trade-off.

If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

> If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.

By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible.

How could you receive your mail in a world where we never give out/collect info that is potentially hazardous?