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> "De-identified data isn’t" People don't yet have intuition about this. I still don't even know how to articulate it. Here's a stab: "With enough data collec

> "De-identified data isn’t" People don't yet have intuition about this. I still don't even know how to articulate it. Here's a stab: "With enough data collected, you can uniquely identify people by ruling out everyone else." Mid 2000s, Seisent was helping law enforcement solve cold cases using big data. In layperson's terms, they'd narrow the list of suspects by ruling out everyone who has a solid alibi. At the time, that was achieved by building profiles of everyone, living and dead, simply by compiling 1600 publicly available datasets. Like court records and mortgages and whatnot. Today you'd include location tracking, social media, all financial tracking, etc. It's remarkable that any crime goes unsolved. Like the back log of rape test kits, it's only because no one cares enough to bother to look.

pokot0 5y ago
Just playing akinator once will help giving an intuition about this.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  Web version of Akinator. [0] Pretty neat. Pity about the site's high CPU usage. [0] https://en.akinator.com/ https://en.akinator.com/
  - Banana699 5y ago
    I thought of John Kennedy the first time, took the game about 55 questions to get to it, it didn't until it knew that he was a US president, was assassinated (as far as I know only Lincoln and Kennedy meet those two criteria together) AND that he lived in the 20th century, so it couldn't even rule out Lincoln. Next game I thought of Cameron Diaz, the game simply gave up after the 25th question or so. It's a pretty neat idea overall, reminds me of those link-following competitions using Wikipedia where you have to start from a topic and get to another completely unrelated topic solely by recursively chasing links. They both exploit the interconnected nature of our culture, a question (or an article) about a recent TV show providing a clue (or a link) about a pretty unrelated historical character. The game desperately needs some notion of statistical proximity though, it kept asking whether the character was an actor even after knowing he is a president, it doesn't do _any_ kind of deduction on what it already knows, just mad slash-and-dash till it gets the identifying info.
    - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
      It worked much better for me. It got South Park's Stan Marsh in not too many guesses.
    - kofejnik 5y ago
      Just checked, it got jfk in 19 questions
- specialist 5y ago
  Thanks. aka 20 questions. Practically, this will likely yield the same results. Remember I'm still struggling with phrasing: I have no idea how akinator is implemented. 20 questions is traditionally a drill down decision tree. From their blurb, I infer that akinator divines its own decision tree, vs user supplied questions. Clever. Instead of finding a needle in a haystack, the big data strategy is to progressively remove all the hay until the needle is revealed. Like the big data equiv of Sherlock Holmes' deduction (logic). "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever left, however improbable, must be the truth." Again, am not an academic, philosopher. I don't know what to call this strategy. It's not logic, reasoning. It's brute force. Test every single possibility to find the matches. In other words, it's a database query. Ok, maybe I'm just confusing myself here.

pokot0 5y ago

Just playing akinator once will help giving an intuition about this.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
Web version of Akinator. [0] Pretty neat. Pity about the site's high CPU usage. [0] https://en.akinator.com/ https://en.akinator.com/
- Banana699 5y ago
  I thought of John Kennedy the first time, took the game about 55 questions to get to it, it didn't until it knew that he was a US president, was assassinated (as far as I know only Lincoln and Kennedy meet those two criteria together) AND that he lived in the 20th century, so it couldn't even rule out Lincoln. Next game I thought of Cameron Diaz, the game simply gave up after the 25th question or so. It's a pretty neat idea overall, reminds me of those link-following competitions using Wikipedia where you have to start from a topic and get to another completely unrelated topic solely by recursively chasing links. They both exploit the interconnected nature of our culture, a question (or an article) about a recent TV show providing a clue (or a link) about a pretty unrelated historical character. The game desperately needs some notion of statistical proximity though, it kept asking whether the character was an actor even after knowing he is a president, it doesn't do _any_ kind of deduction on what it already knows, just mad slash-and-dash till it gets the identifying info.
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    It worked much better for me. It got South Park's Stan Marsh in not too many guesses.
  - kofejnik 5y ago
    Just checked, it got jfk in 19 questions
specialist 5y ago
Thanks. aka 20 questions. Practically, this will likely yield the same results. Remember I'm still struggling with phrasing: I have no idea how akinator is implemented. 20 questions is traditionally a drill down decision tree. From their blurb, I infer that akinator divines its own decision tree, vs user supplied questions. Clever. Instead of finding a needle in a haystack, the big data strategy is to progressively remove all the hay until the needle is revealed. Like the big data equiv of Sherlock Holmes' deduction (logic). "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever left, however improbable, must be the truth." Again, am not an academic, philosopher. I don't know what to call this strategy. It's not logic, reasoning. It's brute force. Test every single possibility to find the matches. In other words, it's a database query. Ok, maybe I'm just confusing myself here.