> It is a technical problem, and I thought it was more or less solved. As a technical problem, it is more or less understood to be unsolvable. The core issue

> It is a technical problem, and I thought it was more or less solved. As a technical problem, it is more or less understood to be unsolvable. The core issue is the more information you strip away, the more sanitized the data is, the less useful it is. Once the statistics of your "representative" set are no longer that (even worse, weirdly biased) you are very limited in what you can do. This works ok if you already 100% know the data you need and don't, but otherwise it falls apart pretty quickly. On the other hand, relatively small numbers of innocuous data points about individuals will identify them uniquely. These two points are in fundamental contention.