8 ms·
Too Unique to Hide
- m4r35n357 7y agoCouldn't enter a month of birth . . .
- Freak_NL 7y agoAt least your country of residence is an option. > Where do you live? > UK US
- forgotmypwd123 7y agoNot a valid Postcode District... Yes it bloody is... Continuing anyway, I arrive at "NaN% of the time!"
- Cynddl 7y agoWups, what is your postcode? Feel free to let me know at luc (at) rocher (dot) lc if you don't want to post it here. We used the complete list of US/UK postcodes (edit: England and Wales only for UK) to implement the demo, so all of them should be there.
- benbristow 7y agoScotland is part of the UK, you know...
- polymatter 7y ago...for now
- benbristow 7y agoWith the SNP pushing for Sexit and now BoJo as PM it wouldn’t surprise me if we left
- _Understated_ 7y agoGawd help us if we do :(
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoSexit? Is that your own neonym?
- benbristow 7y agoI’m pretty sure someone came up with it before me but it’s catchy...
- Dayshine 7y agoWhy not just use the full ONS UK postcode directory? http://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/ons-postcode-directory-may-2017 http://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/ons-postcode-dir...
- Cynddl 7y agoThis is just a dataset of postcodes, no demographic information about the population alas.
- maxheadroom 7y agoNone of the Belfast[0] codes are returning as valid; same for the rest of NI. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_postcode_area#Coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_postcode_area#Coverage
- Cynddl 7y agoYep, we used a dataset by the ONS, which includes only England and Wales. This is indeed not clear on the website, we'll fix that.
- jmkni 7y agoYou might find similar statistics for Northern Ireland from NISRA - https://www.nisra.gov.uk/support/official-statistics https://www.nisra.gov.uk/support/official-statistics And for Scotland from NR Scotland - https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data
- 40four 7y agoI guess it makes sense after you think about it for a minute. This is an illuminating execise to be sure! It's funny how in my head, it seems like it would be way less likeley that you could be indentified with such a high degree of confidence just from those 3 peices of info.
- aaron695 7y agoI don't get why this stuff is a surprise to the hacker community? We deal with entropy and finding users from browsers all the time. IRL this is why stores ask for your postcode, it narrows you down to an individual with other info like CC name or last digits. It's asked to lower entropy. Postcode and DOB you're toast.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoIf the day is removed from the date would this be sufficient to make the data anonymous or should the month also be removed?
- dijksterhuis 7y agoDepends how many people in the same post/zip code have the same birth month, are male/female, etc. E.g. If there’s 1 female in post/zip code XXXX born in 09/79, doesn’t matter if you’re only including the month. There’s a good chance you can work out who she is. It’s a sliding scale dependent on the other attributes in the dataset, and the number of distinct values across all the attributes. The only way to make data completely anonymous is to remove things like birth date tbh.
- NateEag 7y agoI'm no expert, but I think removing the postal code is the obvious way to anonymize. If you can't restrict to a specific geographic area, then who knows who you are. Pragmatically speaking, I noticed that in their "test toggling variables" widget at the end, removing postal code instantly dropped my probability of detection to 0, no matter what other fields were active. So perhaps your geographic location is the information you should be most paranoid about sharing.
- saghm 7y agoI don't think I understand the number I got from this; after putting in my info, it says that if a company put in my demographic info and got a result, it "would be me 39% of the time". Shouldn't that fraction be 1/n for some positive integer n? Are certain people with the same demographic info more likely to be returned than others? Or does the data service give close but not exact matches some percentage of the time? What am I missing?
- itcrowd 7y agoIntuitively, it would make sense to have a 1/n fraction: you must be one out of n people in the database, right? However, I can think of two counter arguments (correct me if I am wrong). 1) Consider that your date of birth + postcode appears twice in a dataset. Naively, the operator can think to correctly identify you 50% of the time (you are either entry #1 or entry #2). But, it is also possible that you are not actually in the list. Maybe there are two other people in the area with your DoB which are not in the database, thereby reducing the odds of guessing correctly. You have to correct for this sampling bias. Also, the result is now not necessarily in the form of 1/n anymore. 2) Consider that you now have two datasets that together contain the whole population (but there is overlap between the datasets that is difficult / impossible to remove). Your DoB + postcode appears 3 times in the first set and 5 times in the second dataset. Then ask again: what are the odds of identifying you from the 8 candidates? Again, this does not give a solution in the form of 1/n.
- vermilingua 7y agoI found it a little on the nose to complete the first interactive (about how very few points of data can track you between datasets), only to receive a Share on Twitter/Facebook. If only people would practice what they preach.
- nemetroid 7y agoAs an aside, other countries can have considerably smaller post code areas than US or UK. For example, here's the size of a typical Swedish post code, probably less than a thousand people: https://www.hitta.se/kartan!~57.68616,11.91682,16z/tr!i=5N3q01sC/search!i=2001232518!q=41452%2C%20G%C3%B6teborg!t=single!st=plc!ai=2001232518!aic=57.68787:11.91388 https://www.hitta.se/kartan!~57.68616,11.91682,16z/tr!i=5N3q...
- dariosalvi78 7y agoSweden is weird. I have recently moved here. After two months I googled my name and, surprise, my address, birthdate, home ownership, phone number, people coliving with me, car and other information was all there. I understand it's for a reason (see here https://hejsweden.com/en/swedish-privacy-personal-information/ https://hejsweden.com/en/swedish-privacy-personal-informatio...) and I respect it, but I wonder how long it will take until someone makes bad usage of these data.
- DanBC 7y agoEnglish postcodes have two parts. Here's an example: GL52 2SE The GL52 part covers large parts of Cheltenham. https://www.postcodes-uk.com/GL52-postcode-district https://www.postcodes-uk.com/GL52-postcode-district But the full post code GL52 2SE covers only 8 addresses in Albion Street. The full post code covers from KwikFit up to 132. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Albion+St,+Cheltenham+GL52+2SE/@51.8989323,-2.0688246,3a,75y,96.29h,90.06t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sARTo2RT5FY4I4hNYEhOItQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x48711b9595eb534d:0x3f8d4e355f3228e6!8m2!3d51.8989702!4d-2.0685344 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Albion+St,+Cheltenham+GL... Plus this bike shop: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Albion+St,+Cheltenham+GL52+2SE/@51.8998816,-2.0700704,3a,75y,45.99h,89.4t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sg4I7W_GHNsZ0S43BVUa9IA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x48711b9595eb534d:0x3f8d4e355f3228e6!8m2!3d51.8989702!4d-2.0685344 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Albion+St,+Cheltenham+GL...
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoSomeone I know has 2 postcodes for their house. You can probably trace that person on that fact.
- dijksterhuis 7y agoThe company I worked for previously had access to a big dataset that was “anonymised”. There was one poor individual who was the only person who lives in a certain post code area. Ended up having to get the dataset owners to remove postcodes altogether (GDPR just came in and everyone was on high alert).
- SteveSmith16384 7y agoThe scary thing is that this is what they call "anonymized". Edit: changed.
- anon1253 7y agoThere are several metrics in addition to the k-annonimity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity) that has been going around the past few days. For example l-diversity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-diversity) and t-closeness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-closeness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-closeness) t-closeness, is defined as: An equivalence class is said to have t-closeness if the distance between the distribution of a sensitive attribute in this class and the distribution of the attribute in the whole table is no more than a threshold. A table is said to have t-closeness if all equivalence classes have t-closeness. In short: the distribution of a particular sensitive value should not be further away than a distance t from the overall distribution. Using the t-closeness metric circumvents issues associated with k-anonymity and ℓ-diversity. Briefly, k-anonymity states that a certain attribute class should be present in at least k records, which introduces ambiguity in the data set. However, if each of the k equivalence classes are the same, properties could still be resolved simply by elimination. The ℓ-diversity metric circumvents this problem by adding a further requirement: in addition to the class to being seen in k records, these records must have at least ℓ ‘well represented’ values. But if an attacker knows the real-world distribution of values, then attributes could still be disclosed with a certain probability, simply by combining different data sources
- shadowprofile77 7y agoThe implications of uniqueness through multiple seemingly innocuous data points are quite worrisome in a wider context. For example, in the digital sphere, if X person has a certain pattern of sites visited, browsing habits and so forth, and then tries to anonymize themselves as person Y for browsing in a way that has no direct connection to any of their regular online accounts, a third party correlating even a small amount of browsing and even vague location data by a bunch of unknown activity profiles could presumably then quickly identify that one of them, Y has a high chance of being X. Or if a bunch of online comment text, buying habits, random basic information or whatever from known person profile X were used to search for similar data points among random people, then correlated together, finding out that Y (who is X but decided to change their physical address, country of residence and so forth for personal reasons) matches very closely with X and is thus very likely to be X seems very easy.
- shadowprofile77 7y agoThis could apply to simple text analysis too. some agent looking for now disappeared person X collects a bunch of their known comment, email, chat text, search pattern text and looks for certain distinct words, word patterns and so forth among these things then searches for similar correlations across a broad, maybe global swath of general chat, social media, email, comment, search posting and also correlates some of the sites involved with keyword similarities to easily identify X as Y even though Y has completely disconnected from anything having to do with having been X
- rstuart4133 7y agoOh, it's a story about UK postcodes. To an Australian street addresses in the UK border on the insane. When I was in the UK I had to travel to a B&B at night. I had a GPS but they hadn't given us a street address - just a postcode and house name. You couldn't enter that into our ancient, so I rang them. Initially they didn't give me an address, telling me it was useless. When I persisted they gave me a street name and suburb. I forget the suburb, but I will never forget the street name. It was "The Street". I entered what I had in the GPS, and two hours later I arrived where it said to go. But there was no house with the name given. So we rang them again. Turns out there were three streets named "The Street" all within 1km of each other and we were in the wrong one. We arrive at the correct "The Street", but still can't find the house. We ring them for help, but it's freezing and raining, or at least doing what passes for rain outside of London and they are reluctant. Admittedly it's a short street. We feel like fools, but as we still can't find it so keep calling, and eventually our hosts stand on the road in the rain and flag us down. Turns out the B&B is on a battle axe block and the car has to push past bushes in the entrance to get onto the driveway. At breakfast I make the mistake of expressing my opinion of the UK's street address system. They look insulted and defend it vigorously. Then as we load the car I hear them having a loud "discussion". It turns out a new postman has been appointed who hasn't learnt the house names yet, so the mail hasn't arrived for a few days. They were discussing who should go to the post office to collect it.