{"id":3404,"date":"2011-05-17T15:40:42","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T20:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=3404"},"modified":"2011-05-17T15:48:21","modified_gmt":"2011-05-17T20:48:21","slug":"why-you-cant-really-anonymize-your-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/17\/why-you-cant-really-anonymize-your-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Why You Can&rsquo;t Really Anonymize Your Data"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/radar.oreilly.com\/2011\/05\/anonymize-data-limits.html\">Pete Warden<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/radar.oreilly.com\/2011\/05\/anonymize-data-limits.html\"><p>All the known examples of this type of identification are from the research world &mdash; no commercial or malicious uses have yet come to light &mdash; but they prove that anonymization is not an absolute protection. In fact, it creates a false sense of security. Any dataset that has enough information on people to be interesting to researchers also has enough information to be de-anonymized. This is important because I want to see our tools applied to problems that really matter in areas like health and crime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&rsquo;ve long suspected this to be the case, but I didn&rsquo;t realize that it had already been studied. I wonder whether anything interesting could be deanonymized out of <a href=\"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/21\/consolidated-db\/\">consolidated.db<\/a>. It doesn&rsquo;t worry me personally, but it would be nice if Apple provided a way to opt out.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pete Warden: All the known examples of this type of identification are from the research world &mdash; no commercial or malicious uses have yet come to light &mdash; but they prove that anonymization is not an absolute protection. In fact, it creates a false sense of security. Any dataset that has enough information on people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3404"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3409,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3404\/revisions\/3409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}