Continuing on this theme, our trip to the archives takes us back to January 1985 to a story about a Supreme Court ruling on student privacy. It's a great historical primer that shows, as the archives tend to show, how little our biggest debates change over the years:

The piece shows how this stuff gets thorny quickly. The 1985 case describes how "the Court ruled for the first time that the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure applied to schoolchildren." But there's nothing straightforward about the law when it comes to the definition of unreasonable:

I suggest reading the whole piece.

[If you're online — and, well, you are — chances are someone is using your information. We'll tell you what you can do about it. Sign up for our limited-run newsletter.]

If you're reading this, you probably already know that you're being tracked everywhere online to serve up targeted (read: relevant) advertisements. Since this sort of monitoring is baked into the core of web-browsing architecture, there's not a lot you can do (you can go 'Incognito' and clear cookies or use an ad blocker). Which is why I enjoyed this experiment in online civil disobedience from researchers at Mozilla. It's called "Hey, Advertisers, Track This!" and it's designed to scramble the brains of the myriad ad trackers that monitor your every move. 

The experiment, which you can do for yourself here, allows you to choose from one of four fake user profiles (Hypebeast, Influencer, Doomsday and Filthy Rich). Then it launches 100 (yes, 100) tabs in your browser that are designed to make your browsing behavior look like one of its stereotypical profile types. For example, picking Influencer will launch dozens of tabs with Amazon searches for holistic remedies, pages for meditation apps and other online New Age goodies. 

Once the tabs open, you can close out of the window or delete them individually. If it's successful, the ads that follow you around the internet should change drastically. The hope, according to Mozilla, is to "throw off brands who want to advertise to a very specific type of person."

A few days ago I tried this for myself. Before the experiment I was getting a lot of tech-related ads for services like Google Fi and Verizon (there were also, somewhat inexplicably, a lot of ads for what appeared to be baggy hemp and linen clothes for women over 30). I dialed up the "Track This!" page and chose Doomsday. I let the cascade of prepper tabs wash over me like an early-aughts Alex Jones monologue. In an instant I navigated to a dozen Amazon pages for products like the Emergency Zone Urban Survival 72-Hour Bug Out bag. There were searches for water purification tablets, survivalist tutorials and a few Home Depot links for "outside equipment."

True to its word, the banner ads that followed me around the internet changed pretty quickly. Sensible and chic linen garments became tactical camouflage raincoats. The advertising powers that be thought I'd taken up a sudden interest in Medicare enrollment. The brands had been thrown off!

As the website for the experiment notes, this is more of a stunt than a solution. After all, you're still seeing ads, just not relevant ones. Still, it's a stunt that lays bare how the online ad ecosystem works. And if there's one revealing truth about the whole thing, it's how it demonstrates what a brute-force tool ad targeting is. Despite the constant intrusions and collection of reams of browsing and personal data, much of what's served up to us via interstitial online ads is semi-relevant at best. The machines may know us, but they don't know us. Yet!

We just saw the first conviction of a murder suspect who was identified using genealogy website data.

Here's a great feature on how Amazon is rather quietly building a huge, networked surveillance infrastructure (that we're all willingly welcoming into our homes).

And here's this wild piece: Amazon's Facial Analysis Program Is Building a Dystopic Future for Trans and Nonbinary People

Just a wee bit more Amazon creepiness: Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions

Ha, you thought we were done with Amazon. How cute! How Amazon and the Cops Set Up an Elaborate Sting Operation That Accomplished Nothing

Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections.

Follow @privacyproject on Twitter and The New York Times Opinion Section on Facebook and Instagram.

Charlie Warzel, a New York Times Opinion writer at large, covers technology, media, politics and online extremism. He welcomes your tips and feedback: charlie.warzel@nytimes.com | @cwarzel

In the run-up to the 2020 census, the government has embraced technology as never before, hoping to halt the ballooning cost of the decennial head count. For the first time, households will have the option of responding online, and field workers going door to door will be equipped with smartphones to log the information they collect.

To make it all work, the Census Bureau needed more computing power and digital storage space, so it turned to cloud technology provided by Amazon Web Services.

What the bureau didn't realize — until an audit last year — was that there was an unsecured door to sensitive data left open. Access credentials for an account with virtually unlimited privileges had been lost, potentially allowing a hacker to view, alter or delete information collected during recent field tests.

The Census Bureau says that it has closed off this vulnerability and that no information was compromised. But the discovery of the problem highlights the myriad risks facing next year's all-important head count.

Most concerns about the census have been focused on the Trump administration's effort to include a question about citizenship status, which officials said Tuesday they were abandoning after being blocked by the United States Supreme Court. But far less attention has been paid to other issues that could threaten the census's accuracy.

[How is the census conducted? Here are some answers about the count and how it would have been affected by asking about citizenship.]

Each census is a staggering logistical lift, but the 2020 count presents challenges the Census Bureau has never confronted before.

The government has ambitious plans to use new digital methods to collect data. But the Census Bureau has had to scale back testing of that technology because of inadequate funding — raising the risk of problems ranging from software glitches to cyberattacks.

Also new is the threat of online disinformation campaigns reminiscent of the 2016 presidential cycle. The heated political discourse about the citizenship question has supplied ample fuel, and researchers say they are already beginning to see coordinated online efforts to undermine public trust in the census and to sow chaos and confusion.

The intense focus on the citizenship question "has drawn away energy and resources in ways that have really been counterproductive to the bureau's efforts," said Arturo Vargas, chief executive of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "To some extent, the bureau is going into 2020 blindfolded."

The consequences could be profound and enduring. Information gathered during the census is used to determine which states gain or lose seats in the House and votes in the Electoral College, to redraw congressional districts and to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding for a host of services, such as health care, education and affordable housing. Businesses rely heavily on the data to make decisions about where to open stores or ship goods.

The Census Bureau said that it has fixed problems identified during testing and is working with other government agencies and private companies to guard against technical mishaps, cyber-related vulnerabilities and the spread of misinformation. "We are confident in the resources we have to conduct a complete and accurate census," the bureau said.

But the danger if anything goes wrong, said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staff member and longtime census expert, is that "public confidence plummets and people decide this is not going to be a good census so we're not going to respond."

"At that point," she said, "we could be headed toward a failed census."

Mandated by the Constitution, the census has been conducted without fail every 10 years since 1790. The first was conducted by United States marshals who traveled on horseback and asked residents just six basic questions.

Since then, the census has grown far more elaborate, though the process for conducting it — mailing out paper forms and relying heavily on field workers going door to door — remained essentially the same from 1970 through 2010.

Over time, however, costs have soared while response rates have declined. The average cost, in 2020 dollars, to count one housing unit increased from about $16 in 1970 to about $92 in 2010, a Government Accountability Office analysis found.

"We needed a breakthrough," said Robert Groves, director of the bureau during the 2010 census. "We couldn't continue the trend of inflating costs using the same methods."

The transition to new technologies for 2020, such as issuing smartphones to field workers, represents a "huge jump" in the right direction, Mr. Groves said.

The greater use of data collected by other agencies, such as Medicare and Medicaid, could help identify vacant households, making more costly in-person follow-up visits unnecessary. Software that tracks field workers' progress and directs them to optimal routes could save time.

For experts, the greater use of technology raises two primary questions: Does it work, and is it secure? The Census Bureau's efforts to answer those questions have been hampered by inadequate resources.

Security tests of some IT systems that were originally supposed to take up to eight weeks had to be completed in about one week, the G.A.O. found. The bureau conducted its critical 2018 dress rehearsal, planned to take place in three communities, in just one: Providence County, R.I.

Though the bureau said it has fixed the problems identified during this dry run, the G.A.O. expressed concern over the missed opportunity to test new technology in places such as rural West Virginia or tribal land in Washington State — areas that would have been covered under the original plan.

"Our concern is that the bureau may not know what it doesn't know," said Robert Goldenkoff, director of the Government Accountability Office's strategic issues team. "Not every place looks like Providence, Rhode Island."

In Providence and during other, smaller-scale field tests, census workers encountered technological issues, the G.A.O. reported. A software glitch sent multiple canvassers to the same block. Some workers had trouble finding an internet connection to transmit the information they had collected. Others had trouble recording people's responses in an application on their smartphones.

These types of small hang-ups, while manageable in one community, could amount to big problems on a national scale, G.A.O. has warned.

And then there is the risk of a cyberattack. The Commerce Department's Office of Inspector General, which discovered the cloud security problem last year during an audit, said the vulnerability it found was "potentially catastrophic." If a hacker had gained access to the lost user credentials, the inspector general found, the Census Bureau "would have been powerless to stop an attacker from causing irreparable harm."

Hackers could also target bureau employees with phishing emails containing links that, when clicked, install malware, for example. In 2016, a cyberattack forced a temporary shutdown of the Australian census's online response site, prompting the social media hashtag #CensusFail.

The Census Bureau said it has been able to test its IT systems in a variety of settings and that its cybersecurity team "is partnering with federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the federal intelligence community, as well as industry experts to share threat intelligence information."

"In the case we do face an incident," the bureau said, "our team is prepared to take action to contain the threat and share information, as soon as possible, if there is any impact on the American public."

The potential spread online of bogus or misleading information presents another novel risk.

"If you wanted to provoke fears among the population as to how the census data could be used," said Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies the interplay of technology and government, "the American population is fertile ground right now for conspiracy theories and manipulation."

The controversy over the citizenship question could provide fodder for provocateurs seeking to spread falsehoods and confusion. Groups monitoring for this sort of content said they had already seen examples appearing, primarily on far-right websites.

Numerous experts cited a recent post on a neo-Nazi website urging people to apply for a job going door to door for the Census Bureau so they could report suspected noncitizens to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Doing so, however, would be illegal. Census workers are required to swear a lifetime oath not to disclose respondents' personal information, including to other government agencies, under the penalty of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

So far, such posts seem to originate within the United States, said Maria Filippelli, a public interest technology census fellow at New America. But she expects eventually to see foreign actors intervene as well.

"There are a lot of people who want to undermine our democracy, very similar to what we saw in the 2016 election," she said.

The Census Bureau said it is working with big technology companies, including social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to detect and counter disinformation efforts. One way, the bureau said, is to make sure that accurate information is highlighted at the top of search results, while fake websites and misinformation are pushed to the bottom.

Facebook announced on Sunday that it is expanding its efforts to combat election interference to include bad information about the census or threats of violence toward anyone participating in it.

A Twitter spokesperson said the company has met several times with Census Bureau officials "to discuss the best ways to support a healthy conversation on Twitter regarding the 2020 Census."

Given the distrust among groups that historically have been undercounted, the bureau's efforts to build trust through partnerships with businesses and local community leaders will be both more important and more difficult than ever, census experts said.

Convincing the reluctant to respond "will require much more repetition than in the past," Steve Jost, a former Census Bureau official, said.

Enlisting the aid of businesses to promote participation is proving much more challenging now, said Mr. Vargas, of the organization of Latino officials. In the past, he said, companies agreed to incorporate census-related messages in advertisements and store displays, for example. This cycle, that has changed, he said.

"I have not seen the level of reluctance among business leaders to participate in a census like this one," Mr. Vargas said. "Business leaders are allergic to issues that are perceived to be controversial, especially if they have any kind of racial controversy mixed in."

The greatest risk to the census, former officials say, is that the public loses faith in the legitimacy of an independent institution at the core of American democracy — whether because of a crashed website, a partisan fight or a drumbeat of disinformation.

"The price is poor quality data," Mr. Jost said, "and the price of that lives with us for a decade."

Nike planned to celebrate the Fourth of July with a new sneaker, a special edition of the Air Max 1 Quick Strike featuring that most patriotic of symbols: an American flag.

But rather than including a flag with 50 stars as part of its design, the sneaker's heel featured the 13-star model, a design associated with the Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and, for some people, a painful history of oppression and racism.

On Tuesday, Nike canceled the release of the sneaker, again plunging headlong into the nation's culture wars.

The abrupt cancellation came after Colin Kaepernick, the former National Football League quarterback and social justice activist, privately criticized the design to Nike, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.

Mr. Kaepernick, who signed a lucrative deal to serve as a Nike brand ambassador last year, expressed the concern to the company that the Betsy Ross flag had been co-opted by groups espousing racist ideologies, the person said.

Sandra Carreon-John, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement on Tuesday that Nike had made the decision to "halt distribution" of the sneaker "based on concerns that it could unintentionally offend and detract from the nation's patriotic holiday." The company's initial acknowledgment of the recall hours earlier did not explain the reasoning behind the decision.

While people all across the political spectrum debated the issue on social media, Gov. Doug Ducey, Republican of Arizona, announced on Twitter that he would pull back state support for a Nike facility that would have employed more than 500 people. Nike had proposed to open the $184 million plant in Goodyear, Ariz.

"Words cannot express my disappointment at this terrible decision," Mr. Ducey said in a series of tweets, adding that Nike "has bowed to the current onslaught of political correctness and historical revisionism."

The governor, who had previously called the factory "an exciting project," also said: "Arizona's economy is doing just fine without Nike. We don't need to suck up to companies that consciously denigrate our nation's history."

Susan Marie, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Commerce Authority, said the economic development agency was withdrawing the offer of a grant to Nike, worth up to $1 million, "at the governor's discretion."

In a statement Tuesday, the City of Goodyear called the furor "a difficult situation" but said its offer of financial incentives to Nike still stood, as elected officials from New Mexico sought to capitalize on the uncertainty and lure the plant across the state line.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the cancellation of the sneaker and Mr. Kaepernick's involvement.

Betsy Ross is widely credited with creating the first American flag at George Washington's behest, though most scholars dispute that story as legend, according to the Library of Congress.

To many, the flag is merely a relic, a design that shows up at historical sites like Colonial Williamsburg and on government insignia, like the seal of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"People just see it as a symbol of early America and the founding of our nation," said Lisa Moulder, the director of the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia, which draws more than 1,000 visitors a day. "In Betsy's time, the flag was strictly utilitarian, a military tool."

But the flag has, at least in recent years, cropped up in association with racist ideologies. When the Ku Klux Klan tried to recruit new followers in upstate New York last year, its fliers featured a Klansman flanked by the Confederate flag and the Betsy Ross flag. Similar imagery was reportedly included in a letter sent by the Klan to a college newspaper in Washington in 2017.

In 2016, a school superintendent in Michigan apologized after students waved the 13-star flag alongside a Trump political banner at a football game, writing in a letter to parents that the flag had come "to some symbolizes exclusion and hate." And according to a 2013 investigation by The Albany Herald in Georgia, at least some local Klan units were required to use either that flag or the Confederate flag at ritualistic meetings.

Prominent conservatives argued that Nike's cancellation of the shoe was unpatriotic.

"It's a good thing Nike only wants to sell sneakers to people who hate the American flag," Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, wrote on Twitter.

Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate, tweeted, "Just so you know how this works now: Nothing can happen in America anymore if Colin Kaepernick doesn't like it."

Mr. Kaepernick, who led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl after the 2012 season, became a face of the social justice movement in 2016 after he began kneeling during "The Star-Spangled Banner" to protest police violence against black people and racial inequality in the United States.

His acts of protest inspired similar demonstrations from other professional athletes, but they came under fire from politicians including President Trump, who argued that they were disrespecting the country and the military, and some fans boycotted the N.F.L.

After receiving no offers to join with a team after the 2016 season, Mr. Kaepernick accused the N.F.L. of trying to keep him and a former teammate, Eric Reid, out of the league. In February, the two reached a surprise settlement with the N.F.L. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

A Nike billboard in Manhattan featuring Colin Kaepernick. The company made Mr. Kaepernick the face of its "Just Do It" campaign last year.CreditAlba Vigaray/EPA, via Shutterstock

As part of his lucrative endorsement arrangement with Nike, Mr. Kaepernick appeared prominently in an advertising campaign celebrating the 30th anniversary of the company's "Just Do It" slogan. In the wake of the ad, some consumers called for a boycott of Nike, while others destroyed their Nike products.

But analysts said that Nike had not suffered financially from its association with an athlete who had become a symbol of the so-called Resistance movement.

"Pretty much every metric you can look at was positive for Nike — their social media mentions went up, their sales rose the week after, and they won a bunch of awards for the ad campaign," said Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst for the NPD Group. "They are clearly aligned with their core customer base — the millennial and the Gen Z consumer — and if they have alienated others, those are not the folks who buy a lot of Nikes."

The decision to cancel the special Air Max shoe is a sign of Mr. Kaepernick's power at Nike, said Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Nike is signaling that they're going to go all-in on this road, whatever the consequences are, even if it's going to get some consumers to burn their shoes on Twitter," he said.

But it can be risky for corporations to ally themselves with divisive brand ambassadors.

"When you get into the game of commodifying social issues in a time of ultra-volatile global political sensitivity, you better create a department in your organization that does nothing all day and night but monitors and understands that state of play," David A. Hollander, an assistant dean and associate professor at New York University's Tisch Institute for Global Sport, said in an email.

Companies have reacted quickly to brand gaffes in the past. H & M apologized last year for using a black child to model a hoodie that said "coolest monkey in the jungle" and removed the sweatshirt from its stores. The year before, Zara withdrew a miniskirt featuring a cartoon that resembled Pepe the Frog, a character designated as an alt-right hate symbol.

Those examples were more obviously offensive than the commemorative Nikes, several branding experts said. But Mr. Reed, of the Wharton School, said that, for many consumers, the 18th-century flag was representative less of the fight for freedom from British rule than of a period of race-based oppression.

"For lots of people, it's quite similar to, say, the Confederate flag," Mr. Reed said. "The revolution now is one of diversity, of all kinds of dimensions that go beyond just white males — women, people of color, people of different sexual orientations. It's a different world, and it's a different flag."