Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible?
In 1995, the European Union introduced privacy legislation that defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. The legislators were apparently thinking of things like documents with an identification number, and they wanted them protected just as if they carried your name.
Today, that definition encompasses far more information than those European legislators could ever have imagined—easily more than all the bits and bytes in the entire world when they wrote their law 18 years ago.
Much of this data is invisible to people and seems impersonal. But it’s not. What modern data science is finding is that nearly any type of data can be used, much like a fingerprint, to identify the person who created it: your choice of movies on Netflix, the location signals emitted by your cell phone, even your pattern of walking as recorded by a surveillance camera. In effect, the more data there is, the less any of it can be said to be private, since the richness of that data makes pinpointing people “algorithmically possible,” says Princeton University computer scientist Arvind Narayanan.
We’re well down this path already. The types of information we’ve thought of as personal data in the past—our name, address, or credit card records—are already bought and sold by data brokers like Acxiom, a company that holds an average of 1,500 pieces of information on more than 500 million consumers around the world. This was data that people put into the public domain on a survey form or when they signed up for services such as TiVo.
See the full article here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514351/has-big-data-made-anonymity-impossible/