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I did some consulting on this WAAAAY back in the day. In the case of education, good enough anonymization often isn't really possible. A lot of information abo
by ke88y 3y ago
I did some consulting on this WAAAAY back in the day.
In the case of education, good enough anonymization often isn't really possible. A lot of information about school students is public -- yearbooks are gold mines, as are results from extra-curricular activities such as sports, class notes about whether/where they went to college or first jobs after college, etc. Still more can be purchased. As yet more can be inferred from public data (eg home address, rough estimates at parental income, etc.). This was back in the day. I'm sure now it's much worse.
Most of the questions you want to ask about education are about treatments and outcomes. If these treatments (eg extra-curriculars) and outcomes (eg attended college, graduated HS, etc) are public then you can often figure out which student corresponds to each supposedly anonymous data-point.
Maybe not perfectly. But way more than you would think. It's like the statistics version of those little logic puzzles from grade school -- "Four people have red hair. Five are girls and two are boys. Billy and Sally are chewing gum. Boy gum chewers have brown hair. No one over 5 has red hair. Sally is 4. etc. etc. etc. Match each person's name with their hair color.". You sort of figure out a small set of data points, then look at the results of the paper and reverse engineer some statistical calculations, and then a surprising amount of the others start falling into place.
We didn't have a name for it when I did this work, but the basic point was "if you publish the dataset everyone will know little Johnny Table's test scores and GPA". Today this is called a reidentification attack.
(I don't really know enough about the topic to have an opinion on the article per se, but "just publish everything" is definitely not a workable solution :))
- mrangle 3y agoProvide proof by de-anonymizing one data set from research within the past five years.
- ke88y 3y agoLOL. I'm not going to deanonymize datasets for an internet stranger. Certainly not for free, but also not at any hourly rate unless I know that the organization employing me either has the original non-anonymized dataset or at least have very strict internal controls about how deanonymized data will be handled. (I also haven't done this work in a LONG time, and there's now a whole lot of academic work on the topic that didn't exist back then, so there are probably much better consultants for legitimate organizations looking to hire for this work.) If you want proof, you can use google to find LOTS of papers along these lines analyzing real datasets. I think https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0610105.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0610105.pdf is a fairly typical example.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoI work with large private K-12 datasets regularly. Even as a passer-by, we had one for a big government-issued dataset in Australia. It might’ve been census data? It might’ve been just over five years ago? I actually don’t care. The principles of effective data anonymisation, esp. in education, are understood by people that actually work in this area. It seems odd to be so demanding.
- ke88y 3y agoI’ve noticed a trend on commenters making these sorts of demands. I can’t tell if it’s a new (particularly dumb) rhetorical ploy or if they’re just looking for free labor.
- malfist 3y agoAnother thing to consider about deanonymization: HIPAA says that 4 or more digits of a zipcode is PII. The people who protect your healthcare think most of a zipcode is too cardinal to reveal. How many schools serve more than one zipcode? More than a few?