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As a reporter for The Upshot, a section of The New York Times that specializes in explanatory and analytical journalism, Emily Badger is used to weeding through decades of data to discover insights. She has unearthed numbers on topics like federal worker resignations and how air-conditioning conquered the United States.
She knew the U.S. government collected a lot of data about Americans. But she was surprised to discover how intimate that information could be. Your personal bank account number, for example. The date of your divorce. Whether you are estranged from your parents.
This information has long been stored in disconnected government data systems. But the Trump administration is now trying to link those systems and consolidate the data under Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Doing so raises major privacy and security concerns, experts say.
Ms. Badger, along with Sheera Frenkel, a Times technology reporter, recently spent about a month and a half compiling and analyzing information about the vast trove of data the U.S. government keeps on Americans.
“We had the idea to publish an extremely long list of everything the government potentially knows about you,” Ms. Badger said in a recent interview. That is exactly what they did. In an article published this month, Ms. Badger and Ms. Frenkel outlined the hundreds of pieces of demographic and identifying personal information the government might know about you, and explored how that information may be at risk if consolidated.
They discussed their reporting over a video call. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What led you to pursue this article?