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From The Electronic Frontier Foundation: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data
Personal information that corporations collect from our online behaviors sells for astonishing profits and incentivizes online actors to collect as much as possible. Every mouse click and screen swipe can be tracked and then sold to ad-tech companies and the data brokers that service them.
In an attempt to justify this pervasive surveillance ecosystem, corporations often claim to de-identify our data. This supposedly removes all personal information (such as a person's name) from the data point (such as the fact that an unnamed person bought a particular medicine at a particular time and place). Personal data can also be aggregated, whereby data about multiple people is combined with the intention of removing personal identifying information and thereby protecting user privacy.
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However, in practice, any attempt at de-identification requires removal not only of your identifiable information, but also of information that can identify you when considered in combination with other information known about you. Here's an example:
- First, think about the number of people that share your specific ZIP or postal code.
- Next, think about how many of those people also share your birthday.
- Now, think about how many people share your exact birthday, ZIP code, and gender.
According to one landmark study, these three characteristics are enough to uniquely identify 87% of the U.S. population. A different study showed that 63% of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified from these three facts.
We cannot trust corporations to self-regulate. The financial benefit and business usefulness of our personal data often outweighs our privacy and anonymity. In re-obtaining the real identity of the person involved (direct identifier) alongside a person's preferences (indirect identifier), corporations are able to continue profiting from our most sensitive information. For instance, a website that asks supposedly "anonymous" users for seemingly trivial information about themselves may be able to use that information to make a unique profile for an individual.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 13 2023, @05:19PM
"Everybody knows" this is true.
IRL they shut down Google Reader or whatever than RSS feed thing was, because a curated list of what websites people visit was apparently unprofitable.
Usually when you see anything "everyone knows is true" but there's no actual evidence or at best some isolated anecdotes, I start to wonder.
"Everyone knows" enormous amounts of money were made by gathering and storing the fact that I posted in this thread, but no one seems to know who's making this huge amount of money or how much they made other than "well the big bad bogeyman is rich now because of it".
Yeah I donno press "F" to doubt.
Pretty scary when you realize a lot of health, nutrition, and fitness advice, even from medical "authorities", comes from the same 'everyone knows' source or sometimes it's even worse, it's in direct opposition to published recent medical research or was based on propaganda.