for a variety of purposes because it is a unique indicator of one specific student. Obviously, one of its potential uses is to indicate that Sally Green has student health insurance. In the course of Sally’s medical treatment in the emergency room, perhaps a sample of her blood is taken to assist in the diagnosis or treatment of her head trauma. The blood tests are subsequently indexed with Sally’s student identification number. Two different contexts related to Sally are now related to each other in a rather public, transparent way; her school persona and her health persona. The privacy concerns of Sally and her parents might be very different for these two domains.

The problem we perceive here is not one that derives from the establishment of a good indicator of differential identity. In fact, both of these domains have a strong expectation of being able to establish in a trustworthy fashion Sally Green’s differential identity. Rather, it is useful if people can project different persona into different domains and ground those different persona in the differential identity strongly connected to the biophysical person. One approach to accomplishing this is to use a different indicator, an identity-index, for associating some attribute to differential identity. Suppose, for example that when performing the blood tests on Sally Green it was found that she had leukemia or at least the strong possibility of having leukemia. This might well be a health condition that Sally Green’s parents did not want associated with her school record. Certainly, any disclosure of these facts should be the parent’s decision. When she visits a new doctor, they may want her to be known only as a person who has leukemia. If she is older, when she goes to the voting booth, she certainly wants to be known only as a person who is legally entitled to vote. The voting booth volunteers have no business knowing that a voter has leukemia and if the voting system is well designed, they don’t even need to know the name of the voter. The key to all of these situations, and maintaining privacy relative to each, is to establish an identity index that is strongly tied to Sally Green’s differential identity but which is used to attribute information to her in only selected contexts. We can use such techniques to actually make the privacy constraints stronger than would be possible through attempts at anonymity. Of course, this is all contingent on being able at some point in the process to determine a person’s differential identity.

As we’ve noted, there can be profound distinctions between counting large populations of people and counting a box of apples. If we want to count the people sitting on an airplane prior to departure from the gate, then the counting problem is quite similar to our example. We go from the front to the back of the plane while counting the people occupying the seats, and everybody behind us has already been counted; they are in the already counted box. This can even work on an Airbus 380 or a Boeing 747, both multi-deck aircraft. We just have a different flight attendant count each deck of the plane while more flight attendants monitor the stairways so a person can’t change decks during the count. Our consideration of a means to count the students in a school is a more elaborate approach to this situation. Now, let’s consider a more complex problem; that of counting the people in a large, diverse population while that population is in a state of considerable flux.

The people within the United States constitute just such a large population. At the time of this writing, it is estimated that there are over 300,000,000 people in the United States. A new person is born about every ten seconds and someone dies about every fifteen seconds. People enter the country from abroad each year by the millions and they depart as well in similar numbers. Some of these people are allowed to become citizens while others are primarily allowed to work and pay taxes. The seminal trust purveyor of the primary social order, that is the Constitution of the United States, mandates that this population is to be counted and a variety of subgroups identified during the count. Further, this population is to be counted at least once every ten years. The Constitution

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