Anonymized data sets are a joke. And, as a newly published study shows, the joke just so happens to be on you.
From your credit card purchases to your medical records to your online browsing history, companies are sharing and selling so-called de-identified data sets containing a record of your every move. The information is supposedly stripped of any specific details — like your name — that would tie it directly back to you. However, it just so happens that true anonymization of your personal data is a lot more difficult than you might think.
So finds a study published today in the journal Nature Communications. Researchers determined that, using their model, “99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes.” Read more…
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