Anonymized Data Cannot Protect User Privacy, Researchers Said

Posted by Eyerys on July 30th, 2019

In the world where data is transacted all the time, the cost includes unveiling user privacy.

This is regarded as a necessity in living in the modern connected ecosystem. From searching the web, using social media networks, to routine visit to the doctor, people are handing over an increasing amount of personal data to whoever they are interacting with.

From a privacy point of view, this is concerning.

With the huge amount of data people are generating, the flow of information can go from individuals to companies, to other companies and even third-parties that shouldn't be involved in the first place. User data has become a commodity, and this is happening all the time.

Privacy concerned individuals who are concerned about this fact, may grow anxious. There is little that can be done to stop the flow, as the process is crucial to the ecosystem.

One of the ways to keep those transacted personal data private, companies have made some anonymization of data. This approach of information sanitization is to protect privacy, by either encrypting or removing personally identifiable information from data sets.

This way, people whom the data describe should remain anonymous.

And by storing this kind of anonymized information inside massive databases, it should be nearly impossible for anyone to trace back the data to a single human.

But according to researchers, individuals in a sample database can be re-identified 83 percent of the time using just three data points: zip code, gender, date of birth.

Read: https://www.eyerys.com/articles/anonymized-data-cannot-protect-user-privacy-researchers-said