3 ms·
The article title misses a bit of nuance from the paper which is specifically talking about re-identification. e.g from the paper: "We show that, as a male bo
by shusson 7y ago
The article title misses a bit of nuance from the paper which is specifically talking about re-identification.
e.g from the paper:
"We show that, as a male born on July 31, 1945 and living in Cambridge (02138), the information used by Latanya Sweeney at the time, William Weld was unique with a 58% likelihood (ξx = 0.58 and κx = 0.77), meaning that Latanya Sweeney’s re-identification had 77% chances of being correct. We show that, if his medical records had included number of children—5 for William Weld—, her re-identification would have had 99.8% chances of being correct!"
- Freak_NL 7y agoWhat accounts for that remaining 2‰ of uncertainty?
- air7 7y agoGood question. I'd also assume that re-identification chances would always be of the form 100/k (k being the integer number of people who fit the bill)
- bsanr2 7y agoPerhaps the risk that some of the data the probability is based on is wrong, e.g., "She fits the bill except they only have 4 children and the 5th is an entry error, so it's not her."
- Cynddl 7y agoCo-author here. We designed a statistical model, which is never 100% sure a re-identification is correct. There is, e.g., a non-null probability that two individuals in the US share 5, 10, or even 15 demographics attribute.