zlacker

The article title misses a bit of nuance from the paper which is specifically talking about re-identification.

e.g from the paper:

"We show that, as a male born on July 31, 1945 and living in Cambridge (02138), the information used by Latanya Sweeney at the time, William Weld was unique with a 58% likelihood (ξx = 0.58 and κx = 0.77), meaning that Latanya Sweeney’s re-identification had 77% chances of being correct. We show that, if his medical records had included number of children—5 for William Weld—, her re-identification would have had 99.8% chances of being correct!"

>>shusso+(OP)
What accounts for that remaining 2‰ of uncertainty?

>>Freak_+k2
Good question. I'd also assume that re-identification chances would always be of the form 100/k (k being the integer number of people who fit the bill)

>>Freak_+k2
Perhaps the risk that some of the data the probability is based on is wrong, e.g., "She fits the bill except they only have 4 children and the 5th is an entry error, so it's not her."

>>Freak_+k2
Co-author here. We designed a statistical model, which is never 100% sure a re-identification is correct. There is, e.g., a non-null probability that two individuals in the US share 5, 10, or even 15 demographics attribute.

>>Cynddl+w9
Can you provide a link to your paper?

>>mnky98+yn
The article is available here, in open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3