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Personally identifiable details can be removed from data.

• Jweb_Guru 10y ago
  They actually usually cannot, especially if you want to still be able to do research into them (which is the motivation behind differential privacy).
• mikk14 10y ago
  There is a seminal paper showing how carelessly adopting this point of view can lead to disasters: "87% of the U.S. population is uniquely identified by date of birth, gender, postal code" [1] In many other cases, as pointed out, it's just not possible. I'm studying mobility patterns through cellphone metadata. Even if you strip out the actual phone number with a random ID you still know where a person is going, and thus re-identify them if you have other public data. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney
  • user5994461 10y ago
    full name + date of birth + place of birth. That leaves about 500 non unique individuals in a country of > 50 million inhabitants.
• BlackFly 10y ago
  The very depressing opposite conclusion was discovered in the late 70's: DE Denning, PJ Denning, M Schwartz, ‘‘The tracker: a threat to statistical database security’’, in ACM Transactions on Database Systems v 4 no 1 (1979) pp 76–96 A general tracker can always be found, unless the data released is extremely restricted. Almost anything is personally identifiable as it can be used to build a tracker into the database. I am aware of this result from chapter 9 of Security Engineering (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html) by Ross Anderson, if you are more generally interested.