Sorry, your data can still be identified even if it’s anonymized by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan.
From the post:
Thanks to the near-complete saturation of the city with sensors and smartphones, we humans are now walking, talking data factories. Passing through a subway turnstile, sending a text, even just carrying a phone in your pocket: we generate location-tagged data on an hourly basis. All that data can be a boon for urban planners and designers who want to understand cities–and, of course, for tech companies and advertisers who want to understand the people in them. Questions about data privacy are frequently met with a chorus of, It’s anonymized! Any identifying features are scrubbed from the data!
The reality, a group of MIT scientists and urban planners show in a new study, is that it’s fairly simple to figure out who is who anyway. In other words, anonymized data can be deanonymized pretty quickly when you’re working with multiple datasets within a city.
…
“As researchers, we believe that working with large-scale datasets can allow discovering unprecedented insights about human society and mobility, allowing us to plan cities better,” observed Daniel Kondor of MIT’s Future Urban Mobility Group in the release. “Nevertheless, it is important to show if identification is possible, so people can be aware of potential risks of sharing mobility data,” adding, “currently much of this wealth of information is held by just a few companies and public institutions that know a lot about us, while we know so little about them. We need to take care to avoid data monopolies and misuse.”
In other words, as urban planners, tech companies, and governments collect and share data, we now know that “it’s anonymized” is never a guarantee of privacy. And as they dig deep into the data we generate, cities and citizens need to demand that this data can never be reidentified.
(emphasis in original)
I’m sorely puzzled by the “…avoid data monopolies and misuse.” We already have data monopolies and misuse of data (Facebook for example.).
Do you think they mean break-up data monopolies and regulate the use of data?
Both of those seem very unlikely.
A solution may lie in “…just a few companies and public institutions that know a lot about us, while we know so little about them.”
While freeing data from “just a few companies and public institutions,” you could learn and share a great deal about them.
Something to keep in mind!