4 ms·

> researchers at MIT showed that using only gender, date of birth and ZIP code, it is possible to identify the majority of US residents! Source? How were they

• maxerickson 8y ago
  There are large databases that have names, zipcodes and dates of birth in them. If you include year, birth dates carry an awful lot of information.
• Someone 8y ago
  2 genders times ~25,000 date of births (70-ish years) times 40,000 zip codes equals 2 billion. The population won’t be uniformly distributed over date of birth or zip code, but that gives a factor of six or so leeway. The 87% paper is https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pdf https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.p.... It says: ”It was found that 87% (216 million of 248 million) of the population in the United States had reported characteristics that likely made them unique based only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of birth}. About half of the U.S. population (132 million of 248 million or 53%) are likely to be uniquely identified by only {place, gender, date of birth}, where place is basically the city, town, or municipality in which the person resides. And even at the county level, {county, gender, date of birth} are likely to uniquely identify 18% of the U.S. population. In general, few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person.” More info likely available via http://latanyasweeney.org/work/identifiability.html http://latanyasweeney.org/work/identifiability.html (discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967)