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[return to "Algorithm can pick out almost any American in supposedly anonymized databases"]
1. shalma+Yf[view] [source] 2019-07-24 12:31:44
>>zoobab+(OP)
While things like this sound scary, deanonymization turns out to be not exceedingly impactful in practice. Most entities have no desire to deanonymize you, to them, the most useful format is to treat you as a GUID with a bag of attributes attached to it.

Of the entities that remain, they fall into two buckets: Ones powerful enough that they already have personally identifiable data without the need to deanonymize anonymous data sets and ones small enough that they don't have the capabilities to deanonymize.

If you're a government, you don't need to rely on anonymized data sets, you have the sets with the labels already. If you're a stalker or internet troll or whatever, it's far easier to just pay one of the PI websites $29 to get far more data on a person than any deanonymized dataset will give you.

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2. samfri+8j[view] [source] 2019-07-24 12:54:48
>>shalma+Yf
I think there are still threats that come from improperly anonymized data, beyond my own government or a single stalker/harasser.

For one, that this data is improperly anonymized would make it an easy avenue for malicious nation-state actors to use to track/analyze/destabilize the population. If I am a government with an interest in freaking out the US public, I could quite easily de-anonymize sensitive datasets and begin using them for wide-scale harassment, identity theft, etc. on an automated basis.

The lowering of the bar makes it easier for Johnny Troublemaker to start harassing people based on their PII as well. Instead of paying for the data, just download some datasets and run a Julia notebook against them. Maybe not much changes for the targeted stalking case, but now you can cast a wide net when looking for someone to mess with.

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3. shalma+Vk[view] [source] 2019-07-24 13:05:51
>>samfri+8j
Malicious nation state actors can easily access PII without the need for deanonymization, simply by buying it on the open market.

The number of Johnny Troublemakers who are randomly spraying hate based on PII is about the same as the rate of people throwing rocks off highway overpasses onto cars below. It's simply not a significant enough problem to be worth worrying about.

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