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Privacy, Anonymity, and Big Data in the Social Sciences

• jcr 12y ago
  >"For example, Latanya Sweeney [21] from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has demonstrated that 87 percent of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified with a reasonable degree of certainty by a combination of ZIP code, date of birth, and gender." >"[21] Sweeney, L. (2002b). Achieving k-anonymity privacy protection using generalization and suppression. International Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems 10(5): 571-588." http://dataprivacylab.org/dataprivacy/projects/kanonymity/kanonymity2.pdf http://dataprivacylab.org/dataprivacy/projects/kanonymity/ka... Of course, I was told that my tin-foil hat was on far too tight when I said you should never answer the infamous chat question, "A/S/L?" A bit more seriously, I'm beginning to wonder it is even possible to properly anonymize/de-identify MOOC student data well enough to satisfy all the FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) legislation requirements. It seems the "other information" requirement of the law would make compliance impossible.