Anonymized data is a myth, it seems. Esp location data.

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Sorry, your data can still be identified even if 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.

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 and designers who want to understand cities–and, of course, for tech companies and advertisers who want to understand the people in them. 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.

Carlo Ratti, the MIT Senseable City Lab founder who co-authored the study in IEEE Transactions on Big Data, says that the research process made them feel “a bit like ‘white hat’ or ‘ethical’ hackers” in a news release. First, they combined two anonymized datasets of people in Singapore, one of mobile phone logs and the other of transit trips, each containing “location stamps” detailing just the time and place of each data point. Then they used an algorithm to match users whose data overlapped closely between each set–in other words, they had phone logs and transit logs with similar time and location stamps–and tracked how closely those stamps matched up over time, eliminating false positives as they went. In the end, it took a week to match up 17% of the users and 11 weeks to get to a 95% rate of accuracy. (With the added GPS data from smartphones, it took less than a week to hit that number.)

The rest of the article is here

https://www.fastcompany.com/90278465/sorry-your-data-can-still-be-identified-even-its-anonymized

/giphy panopticon

/image “ministry of love”
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/image “ministry of truth”
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