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The Electronic Frontier Foundation does it to browsers pretty easily. http://panopticlick.eff.org/ http://panopticlick.eff.org/ And according to another artic
by conover 17y ago
The Electronic Frontier Foundation does it to browsers pretty easily.
http://panopticlick.eff.org/ http://panopticlick.eff.org/
And according to another article by them, all you need is zip code, gender and birthday to identify someone with a high degree of certainty.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-personally-identifiable http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-person...
- tedunangst 17y agoBirthday encodes a lot more than one bit of information. The above example was a series of factors that reduced the identified population in half.
- gwern 17y agoAlright; would you prefer me to redo it with pieces of information each worth 7 bits? 'The first piece cuts it down to 2.3 million people...'
- tel 17y agoOf course, zip code and birthday are a pretty huge amount of information. With the simplifying assumptions of roughly uniform distributions, knowing a birthday confers ~8.5 bits and knowing your zip code is worth ~15 bits. That's 23.8 in total. It's not surprising that those two pieces of information can pretty easily narrow down an identity. log2(3*10^8) = 28.2