Sorry, your data can still be identified even it’s anonymized

guest · Dec 10, 2018

Sorry, your data can still be identified even it’s anonymized
Urban planners and researchers at MIT found that it’s shockingly easy to “reidentify” the anonymous data that people generate all day, every day in cities
December 10, 2018
https://www.fastcompany.com/90278465/sorry-your-data-can-still-be-identified-even-its-anonymized

Thanks to the near-complete saturation of the city with sensors and smartphones, we humans are now walking, talking data factories. Passing through a subway turnstile, sending a text, even just carrying a phone in your pocket: we generate location-tagged data on an hourly basis.

All that data can be a boon for urban planners [...] for tech companies and advertisers [...]
Questions about data privacy are frequently met with a chorus of, It’s anonymized! Any identifying features are scrubbed from the data!

The reality, a group of MIT scientists and urban planners show in a new study, is that it’s fairly simple to figure out who is who anyway. In other words, anonymized data can be deanonymized pretty quickly when you’re working with multiple datasets within a city.

[...] “currently much of this wealth of information is held by just a few companies and public institutions that know a lot about us, while we know so little about them. We need to take care to avoid data monopolies and misuse.”
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study IEEE Transactions on Big Data [...] news release
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Palancar · Dec 10, 2018

Nice read. While it demonstrates that tracking WHO is WHERE physically, this would not let those collectors discover what I am doing in cyberspace, based upon my skillset. I should likely be more concerned about this. I accept that I can be tracked physically unless I shed the obvious devices that betray my location. I feel like I know how to disappear if I ever needed to. It would mean a life that I never hope to live.

mirimir · Dec 11, 2018

Yeah. I rarely leave the house, anymore

guest · Jul 23, 2019

Researchers Reveal That Anonymized Data Is Easy To Reverse Engineer
July 23, 2019
https://gizmodo.com/researchers-reveal-that-anonymized-data-is-easy-to-reve-1836629166

While many of the places make promises to keep your identifiable data as secure and private as possible, they can still—and oftentimes do—share anonymized versions of your data to third parties, whether that’s for research or for profit.

But new research indicates that even when data is stripped of any identifiable factors, it doesn’t require a lot of mental gymnastics to piece together certain information and figure out, with pretty high confidence, who the “anonymous” user in the dataset is.

In other words, anonymized data is not so anonymous.
Researchers at Imperial College London published a paper in Nature Communications on Tuesday that explored how inadequate current techniques to anonymize datasets are. Before a company shares a dataset, they will remove identifying information such as names and email addresses, but the researchers were able to game this system.

Specifically, the researchers define their findings as a successful effort to propose and validate “a statistical model to quantify the likelihood for a re-identification attempt to be successful, even if the disclosed dataset is heavily incomplete.”
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“Companies and governments have downplayed the risk of re-identication by arguing that the datasets they sell are always incomplete,” de Montjoye said in a statement. “Our findings contradict this and demonstrate that an attacker could easily and accurately estimate the likelihood that the record they found belongs to the person they are looking for.”
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guest · Jul 24, 2019

Palancar said: ↑

I feel like I know how to disappear if I ever needed to. It would mean a life that I never hope to live.
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I have everything in place in case I want disappear from the grid, but as you said, not the life I want.

korben · Jul 24, 2019

That's what I had been almost certain of the last couple of years and now it's been confirmed geeze rolling my eyes

guest · Jul 24, 2019

korben said: ↑

That's what I had been almost certain of the last couple of years and now it's been confirmed geeze rolling my eyes
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Not surprising indeed, people naively believe they will have anonymity and privacy while keep living the way they do now, thinking that complaining and protesting will help them achieve it.

guest · Feb 3, 2020

Researchers Find 'Anonymized' Data Is Even Less Anonymous Than We Thought
Corporations love to pretend that 'anonymization' of the data they collect protects consumers
February 3, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...d-data-is-even-less-anonymous-than-we-thought

Dasha Metropolitansky and Kian Attari, two students at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, recently built a tool that combs through vast troves of consumer datasets exposed from breaches for a class paper they’ve yet to publish.

“The program takes in a list of personally identifiable information, such as a list of emails or usernames, and searches across the leaks for all the credential data it can find for each person,” Attari said in a press release.
They told Motherboard their tool analyzed thousands of datasets from data scandals ranging from the 2015 hack of Experian, to the hacks and breaches that have plagued services from MyHeritage to porn websites. Despite many of these datasets containing “anonymized” data, the students say that identifying actual users wasn’t all that difficult.
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“On its own, it isn’t particularly powerful, but when multiple leaks are brought together, they form a surprisingly clear picture of our identities. People may move on from these leaks, but hackers have long memories.”
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142395 · Feb 4, 2020

This is why differential privacy which, by mathematically provable way, guarantees identifying an individual beyond certain quantifiable degree by comparing different DBs is impossible is mandatory. Those who don't even use such mechanisms shouldn't be trusted, but those who use also should disclose actual parameters.

guest · Apr 30, 2020

The truth about anonymized data
April 30, 2020
https://protonmail.com/blog/truth-about-anonymized-data/

Many companies that handle personal information reassure their users by saying that all the data is “anonymized.” If you don’t know any better, that sounds reassuring.

However, the method most companies use to anonymize data and the size of modern databases make it easy for attackers to re-identify individuals. From medical records to cell phone data sets, it only takes about a dozen pieces of information to find the person behind each “anonymous” record.
Everyone leaves a trace
By definition, truly anonymized data is stripped of all the elements that could possibly identify the correct individual.
The most popular mode of anonymization is to remove personally identifiable information from a database, such as your name, your birth date, your phone number, your home address, etc.
On the surface, this might seem like enough to protect your privacy.
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However, as you begin overlapping different types of data, you can start to identify people. Indeed, one data anonymization company, Aircloak, even acknowledges that true anonymization is extremely difficult: “as is the case with IT security, no 100% guarantee can be given, and often there is the need for a risk assessment.”
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