Odia Kagan of FoxRothschild writes:
“Whenever we make a call, go to work, search the web, pay with our credit card, we generate data. While de-identification might have worked in the past, it doesn’t really scale to the type of large-scale datasets being collected today.”
It turns out that ” four random points (i.e. time and location where a person has been) are enough to uniquely identify someone 95 percent of the time in a dataset with 1.5 million individuals…”
All these results lead to the conclusion that an efficient enough, yet general, anonymization method is extremely unlikely to exist for high-dimensional data — say Y.A. de Montjoye and A. Gadotti.
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