While many of us are keen on Open Data, it turns out that
anonymization as most of the community knows it does not work very
well, and this fact will likely impact the release of some data sets
that we thought/hoped could be released.
The below paper does an incredibly deep and wide examination of this
issue, and how it will/should impact public policy and legislation.
The work includes some of the pioneering work by Latanya Sweeney who
more than a decade ago showed: "...87% (216 million of 248 million) of
the population in the United States had reported characteristics that
likely made them unique based only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of
birth}. "
http://dataprivacylab.org/people/sweeney/publications.htmlBroken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of
Anonymization, Paul Ohm, University of Colorado Law School
UCLA Law Review, Vol. 57, p. 1701, 2010
U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 9-12
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006Abstract:
Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the
privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for
protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting
information like names and social security numbers. These scientists
have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize'
individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By
understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake,
labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us
much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly
every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators
and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to
the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the
tools to do so.
-Glen Newton
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http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/-
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