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

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