Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new rule that would better protect individuals’ privacy from the companies that collect and collate digital traces from wherever they can. Seemed like a good idea. But the current CFPB director Russell Vought has different ideas.

For Wired, Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra report on the potential harm:

Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information—often without individuals’ knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. This information is frequently resold for purposes ranging from marketing to law enforcement surveillance.

Many people are unaware that data brokers even exist, let alone that their personal information is being traded. In January, the Texas Attorney General’s Office, led by attorney general Ken Paxton, accused Arity—a data broker owned by Allstate—of unlawfully collecting, using, and selling driving data from over 45 million Americans to insurance companies without their consent.

I’m sure money had nothing to do with these choices.

This week we look at how the same data can easily lead to different conclusions that can all be correct, even when they conflict.

Kirk Goldsberry plotted MVP winners in the NBA, by nationality. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander from Canada won this year, which makes that seven years in a row for international players.

I guess it’s not that surprising now that I think about it. There are a lot of international players.

More than anything, it makes me feel old, because it doesn’t seem that long ago when Stephen Curry and LeBron James were the frontrunners each year.

While we’re on maps oriented in unfamiliar ways, Robert Simmon made an upside down world map as a reminder that there is no real top or bottom on this planet. We’re just a spinning globe floating around in space.

The map is available in print. (Thanks, Zan.)

We usually think about mortality in terms of events that happened, because it’s easier to count deaths and who survived a condition after they had it. Hank Green turns attention to celebrating the deaths that did not occur and the diseases fewer people contracted because of prevention measures years prior.

In 1963, the US passed the Clean Air Act and in 1990, we passed the Clean Air Act amendments. The EPA estimates that in 2020, just the 1990 amendments saved 230,000 lives. Hundreds of thousands of people who just kept on living, who didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke or an asthma attack or a lung cancer diagnosis. They never knew they were in danger. No one knows which of the people they are. There’s no party. There’s no parade. There’s just people who aren’t dead.

Watch the full video.
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Land is sinking, or subsiding, at a slow rate of millimeters per year. For the Washington Post, Kasha Patel and Naema Ahmed report on the new research by Ohenhen, L.O., Zhai, G., Lucy, J. et al.

Researchers mapped out how land is moving vertically across the 28 most populous U.S. cities and found all the cities were compressing like a deflated air mattress to some extent. Twenty-five of them are dropping across two-thirds of their land. About 34 million people — about 10 percent of the U.S. population — live in the subsiding areas, according to the study published Thursday in Nature Cities.

It might not seem like an issue now, but when the foundation of a big building is sinking in the middle of the city, the structural integrity is probably not great.

In February, farmers sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for removing data related to climate change. The plaintiffs argued that the data was useful for making business decisions, because the changes are real. The USDA is putting the data back.

The plaintiffs had sought a court order requiring the department to restore the deleted pages. On Monday, the government said it would oblige.

Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to Judge Margaret M. Garnett that he was representing the Agriculture Department in the lawsuit, and that the department had already begun restoring the pages and interactive tools described in the lawsuit. He said the department “expects to substantially complete the restoration process in approximately two weeks.”

Every dataset and study taken down, because it referenced keywords someone didn’t like, should come back.

Card counting is a method to keep track of the cards left in a deck while playing Blackjack. The odds nudge in your favor when there are more large numbers and face cards. Basically, you collect data at the table to forecast the next hands.

A professional card counter, who posts videos under the pseudonym Quattro, describes what it’s like in the casino.
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Speaking of maps centered on specific countries, Engaging Data made an interactive map that lets you select the country and projection to see how the view shifts.

World maps are used to show the geographic relationships between the countries and regions of the world. Their design shapes our perception of the world and those relationships. Two of the important aspects of map design are the choice of map projection and what is centered in the map. The idea for this map dataviz is to let users create their own country centered map by centering the map where you choose (on a country of your choice or a specific point) and the map projection.

This week we look at the step chart and how to highlight specific patterns in the steps.

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Brazil’s agency for statistics and maps, released a world map that shows south on top and Brazil in the center.

This probably looks upside down and off center to most Americans, but more countries should do this.

The birthday effect is a statistical anomaly that shows higher likelihood of death on or near your birthday. For the Pudding, Russell Samora analyzes mortality data to see if this effect is for real.

The differing results across studies highlight how methodological choices—from sample selection to statistical analysis—can dramatically shape our findings. When studying something as basic as birthdays and death, how we approach the problem shapes what answers we find.

Warning: this is a statistics lesson in disguise so you might learn something.

There are plans to reduce staffing at the Social Security Administration by 7,000 and perhaps to rebuild the entire codebase, which means check delays could be a real thing. For the Urban Institute, Richard W. Johnson and Jonathan Schwabish ran the numbers for how many people could be affected if checks are just one, two, or three months late.

We find 11 percent of current Social Security beneficiaries, or 7.4 million people, do not have enough savings to replace their benefits if their Social Security checks were delayed for one month. The share with inadequate savings to replace their Social Security increases to 13 percent (8.3 million people) if checks were delayed for two months and to 14 percent (9.2 million people) if checks were delayed for three months.

For reference, SSA has never missed a benefit payment since its inception eight decades ago.

The NOAA database, dubbed Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters, tracked events that exceeded one billion dollars of damage. It’s kaput. For CNN, Andrew Freedman reports:

The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters — spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms — since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public’s view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly.

Add this to the growing list of discontinued NOAA products, because they are related to climate, even just a tiny bit.

RJ Andrews held an exhibition of data graphics at 41 Cooper in New York. On physical data that exists off the screen:

After my presentation, I was asked about tools and gave my stock answer extolling paper and pencil as the most important creative weapon. This quip surprised me with the biggest applause of the night.

Beautiful information graphics off-screen, in the real world, are a real treat. In some sense the show did not feel special to me as much as it felt natural. The best way to consume data might not be alone on a pocket screen—but together, in conversation, with human-sized artifacts.

Andrews speaks of the satisfaction of such things but also of the challenges of handling physical data.

I’ve felt this with my own physical projects. It’s nice to hold the data. It’s real. It’s tangible.

It takes exponentially more time and effort.

But if we want visualization to extend beyond analytical tools and dashboards, then that’s what we will need to do.

The U.S. and China put a semi-hold on tariffs for the next 90 days. The New York Times provides the timeline so far.

Tariffs on Chinese goods are down to 30% from 145% and tariffs on U.S. goods are down to 10% from the retaliatory 125%. Has anyone explained how countries choose these numbers? They seem arbitrary.

In any case, I’m guessing these step charts will need to update a few times over the next few months. Step charts, which show constant values and then sudden changes over time, might be the chart type of the next few years.

It’s a temporary suspension, for now. For the Washington Post, Maxine Joselow reports:

The program collects data on levels of harmful air pollutants, including ozone and particulate matter, at the 63 national parks in the United States. Federal officials consult this data when deciding whether to grant permits to nearby industrial facilities, such as power plants or oil refineries.

Breathing in these pollutants is linked to a range of adverse health effects. For instance, long- and short-term exposure to particulate matter is associated with heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks and premature death, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

For CNN, Andrew Freedman reports:

Of the hundreds of vacancies, the 30 open meteorologist-in-charge roles are particularly worrying, current and former NWS meteorologists told CNN.

Meteorologists-in-charge serve as the captain of a team of forecasters and other specialized staff members. Their decades of experience often comes into play during high-impact weather situations, an active-duty NWS meteorologist told CNN. They also requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.

In addition to headless offices, fewer weather balloons are launching, less data is collected, and the forecasts become less accurate. Not ideal.

Researchers from the Ocean Discovery League estimated how little we know about the deep seafloor:

We then used two independent methods to estimate the amount of deep seafloor observed globally over the past seven decades (see Methods). Using the dive-based method, we estimate a maximum visual seabed coverage of 2130 km2. Using the time-based method, we estimate visual seabed coverage of 3823 km2.

Of Earth’s total surface area (510 million km2), the seafloor makes up 360 million km2 (approximately 71%). Of this ocean area, approximately 93% is deep seafloor (≥200 m), yielding 66% of the Earth’s total surface area (~335.7 million km2). In the framework of this global context, our exploration coverage estimates show that deep-sea visual tools have only observed 0.0006 to 0.001% of the deep seafloor since 1958.

We’re never going to find Atlantis at this rate.