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Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Ed Felten have published a stinging rebuttal, pointing out the massive holes in Cavoukian and Castro's arguments -- cherry picking studies, improperly generalizing, ignoring the existence of multiple re-identification techniques, and so on.

Cavoukian and Castro are rightly excited by Big Data and the new ways that scientists are discovering to make use of data collected for one purpose in the service of another. But they do not admit that the same theoretical advances that unlock new meaning in big datasets also unlock new ways of re-identifying the people whose data is collected in the set.

Re-identification is part of the Big Data revolution: among the new meanings we are learning to extract from huge corpuses of data is the identity of the people in that dataset. And since we're commodifying and sharing these huge datasets, they will still be around in ten, twenty and fifty years, when those same Big Data advancements open up new ways of re-identifying -- and harming -- their subjects.