Nate Anderson writes: The Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission had a bright idea back in the mid-1990s—it decided to release “anonymized” data on state employees that showed every single hospital visit. The goal was to help researchers, and the state spent time removing all obvious identifiers such as name, address, and Social Security number. But a…
Tag: Paul Ohm
Has there been a failure of anonymization?
Paul Ohm recently put out an article where he makes the dramatic claim that de-identification has failed (see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006). I have heard that argument before and the argument’s primary weakness is amplified in this article – therefore I feel compelled to comment. Paul Ohm’s argument about the failure of anonymization is based on evidence that…