Interesting People mailing list archives
not so anonymous
From: "David Farber" <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 13:20:32 -0500
-----Original Message----- From: Dean F. Sutherland [mailto:dfsuther () cs cmu edu] Sent: Monday, December 24, 2007 11:35 AM To: David Farber Subject: for IP? Fwd: [read20-l] not so anonymous For IP if you like. Dean F. Sutherland dfsuther () cs cmu edu "He that publisheth not a sufficiency, he shall perish: yea, all grants shall be refused him, his contract shall not be renewed, he shall vanish from the sight of his fellows even unto the depths of the teacher's colleges, and his name shall vanish from the footnotes." -- source unknown Begin forwarded message:
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [read20-l] not so anonymous Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 14:21:26 -0800 From: Peter Brantley <peebsley () gmail com> Reply-To: Peter Brantley <peebsley () gmail com> Organization: Digital Library Federation To: Read20 List <read20-l () lists panix com> recently, netflix released some anonymized usage data in order to seed a technical challenge (on recommending algorithms). bruce schneier reports that a team of Univ. of Texas researchers de-anonymized a subset of the data through correlation with public IMdB (internet movie database) entries. bruce extends this by analogy to point how easy this really is and he notes the obvious analogy to book purchasing habits: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/anonymity_and_t_2.html "Someone with access to an anonymous dataset of telephone records, for example, might partially de-anonymize it by correlating it with a catalog merchants' telephone order database. Or Amazon's online book reviews could be the key to partially de-anonymizing a public database of credit card purchases, or a larger database of anonymous book reviews. "Google, with its database of users' internet searches, could easily de-anonymize a public database of internet purchases, or zero in on searches of medical terms to de-anonymize a public health database. Merchants who maintain detailed customer and purchase information could use their data to partially de-anonymize any large search engine's data, if it were released in an anonymized form. A data broker holding databases of several companies might be able to de-anonymize most of the records in those databases. "What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn't hard, and doesn't require a lot of data. It turns out that if you eliminate the top 100 movies everyone watches, our movie-watching habits are all pretty individual. This would certainly hold true for our book reading habits, our internet shopping habits, our telephone habits and our web searching habits." ________________________________________ read20-l : sponsored by Panix in New York City
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- not so anonymous David Farber (Dec 24)