Is Your Search History Private? How PII Data Can Be Built From Anonymous Releases
Last year I wrote about Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, who took anonymous data from medical records and used it to identify real patients. She in fact did so on the medical record of the governor who released the data.
In the video below, Cory Doctorow (of EFF and boing boing fame) picks up this theme. He tells about companies that have released (sold) “anonymous” versions of search and IM sessions only to find that that information can be reconnected to individuals. This is especially topical as the FBI is pushing ISP’s to keep users web logs for two years.
Take away: The best way to keep data private is to destroy it. The next best way to keep it private is not to release it. The worst way, is to try to make it unidentifiable. Under scale, this last option will fail.
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2 Responses to "Is Your Search History Private? How PII Data Can Be Built From Anonymous Releases"
May 21, 2010
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July 18, 2015
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