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There’s No Such Thing as Anonymous Data
by: Scott Berinato February 9, 2015 About a decade ago, a hacker said to me, flatly, “Assume every card in your wallet is compromised, and proceed accordingly.” He was right. Consumers have adapted to a steady thrum of data breach notifications, random credit card charges, and out-of-the-blue card replacements. A privacy-industrial complex has sprung up from this — technology, services, and policies all aimed at trying to protect data while allowing it to flow freely enough to keep the modern electronic bazaar thriving. A key strategy in this has been to “scrub” data, which means removing personally identifiable information (PII) so that even if someone did access it, they couldn’t connect it to an individual. So much for all that. In a paper published in Science last week , MIT scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye shows that anonymous credit card data can be reverse engineered to identify individuals’ transactions, a finding which calls into quest...
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