Every 10 years, the U.S. government counts every living person in the country. The 2020 head count will be the first U.S. census conducted mostly online. “For more than 200 years, the census has been this pencil and paper activity,” said Issie Lapowsky, senior writer at WIRED. “It’s a really human intensive, really time-intensive process.” Lapowsky wrote recently about America’s first online census. She said the U.S. Census Bureau invested in new technology to bring down costs, “but of course, because it’s new technology being deployed for the first time in a really high-stakes environment, there are certainly a lot of risks involved.” She talked with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about some the risks involved with taking the census online. 

Click the audio player above to hear the full interview.