Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 23, 2009 5:27 AM

@ Bruce,

It’s way of topic but have you looked at Prof Paul Ohm’s draft paper on de-anonymisation.

http://epic.org/privacy/reidentification/ohm_article.pdf

It is likley to have some very serious repucusions for law makers.

Essentialy he argues that and data with any level of utility contains enough information to make it PII either directly or indirectly.

And although he takes care to say that anonymisation is not impossible he makes it reasonably clear that “reidentification” technology is in it’s early stages and has a long way to go.

One early example is zip code and birth date together are unique identifiers for more than 2/3 of the US population (and one experiment indicated it could be as much as 7/8 when gender is included).

It makes interesting if not scary reading.