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Is there a technical definition of "personally identifiable information"? Would they be required to provide any guarantees on the properties of the released dat
by j2kun 11y ago
Is there a technical definition of "personally identifiable information"? Would they be required to provide any guarantees on the properties of the released data to ensure that when other data is shared there's no way to link them?
- ubernostrum 11y agoI don't know if there's a general-purpose one, but for medical data HIPAA has had definitions and guidelines for PII for a long, long time. The deeper problem is that any piece or amount of information can, in the right circumstances, become personally-identifiable, and so the only guaranteed-safe system would be to forbid collecting or sharing anything. Which would necessarily result in literally turning off the internet.
- j2kun 11y agoThere is some degree of mathematical guarantee that one can provide, if one is only releasing statistics and not individual records. The technique is called "differential privacy" and it was invented in large part because of a few high-profile data de-anonymization stunts, one of which was in the health industry. At the very least, this allows one to quantify the tradeoff of security and specificity in what is released.