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I would assume that it would be just about impossible to de-identify YC applications, as they are all fairly unique and there is generally a lot of information
by robryan 15y ago
I would assume that it would be just about impossible to de-identify YC applications, as they are all fairly unique and there is generally a lot of information online about each startup. So if an app had a story about a previous product and then that story shows up again in their blog or when they are doing publicity it makes it pretty easy.
- benatkin 15y agoThey could release it like this: pick a small number of fields like number of founders and age, and release each of them as separate arrays. Ex: {"founders": [3, 2, 2, ...], "ages": [31, 22, 27, ...]} (the size of the founders array and the ages array would be different because the first is per-startup and the second is per-founder) Just to get an idea of how vague de-identified data might be. And I'm not even sure that would be de-identified enough.