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Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Sticky data: Why even 'anonymized' information can still identify you - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article19918717

data globe Braga privacy big_data womenslearningstudio

shared by Doris Reeves-Lipscomb on 28 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?
  • That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.
  • University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A similar situation was cited by Princeton University researchers Arvind Narayanan and Edward W. Felten in a recent response to Cavoukian and Castro. The pair wrote that, in one data set where location data had supposedly been anonymized, it was still possible in 95 per cent of test cases to re-identify users “given four random spatio-temporal points” – and 50 per cent if the researchers only had two. In other words, de-identifying location data is moot if you know where a target lives, where they work and have two other co-ordinates they visit with regularity.
  • Doris Reeves-Lipscomb on 28 Jul 15
     
    post by Matthew Braga as special to The Globe and Mail, 8/6/14 on how deidentified data can be hacked to reveal identities of users.
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