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