David Talby writes how scientists are getting closer to complete re-identification of supposedly de-identified data. He writes, in part:
Getting Closer To Complete Re-identification
June 2019 has posed two attacks on this long-time status quo: a technical one and a legal one.
The technical attack came via a paper published in Nature which shows how 99.98% of the U.S. population can be re-identified using 15 demographic attributes — even in a heavily incomplete dataset. It concludes:
“Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.”
Read more on Forbes.