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 se

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.