Privacy – A Dying Concept?
By Gary Seeger, Infoglide Vice President
An intriguing post by Nate Anderson on Ars Technica highlights a difficult reality about today’s easy availability of vast quantities of “anonymized” data. Quoting from a recent paper by Paul Ohm at the University of Colorado Law School, Anderson writes that “as Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: ‘data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.’”
A seminal study published in 2000 by Latanya Sweeney at Carnegie Mellon opened the issue by proving that a simple combination of a very small number of publicly available attributes can uniquely identify individuals:
“It was found that 87% (216 million of 248 million) of the population in the United States had reported characteristics that likely made them unique based only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of birth}. About half of the U.S. population (132 million of 248 million or 53%) are likely to be uniquely identified by only {place, gender, date of birth}, where place is basically the city, town, or municipality in which the person resides… In general, few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person.”
Faced with a choice between exploiting easily obtainable data for righteous ends versus the potential misuse of identifying individuals, can an appropriate balance be struck by privacy legislation? Anderson points out that:
“Because most data privacy laws focus on restricting personally identifiable information (PII), most data privacy laws need to be rethought. And there won’t be any magic bullet; the measures that are taken will increase privacy or reduce the utility of data, but there will be no way to guarantee maximal usefulness and maximal privacy at the same time.”
Looking at the subject from a business perspective, using technologies such as identity resolution to connect non-obvious data relationships serves many initiatives. It would seem admirable to exploit public records and other forms of publicly available information to mitigate risks, uncover fraud, or track down “bad” guys. Yet some cry foul when the technology exposes individuals who didn’t anticipate that their “private” information would be used to identify and/or track them down.
In the rapidly evolving cyber-information age, the desires, conflicts, and limitations of protecting privacy will continue to be sorted out in the legal realm. Those of us who solve business issues using identity resolution technology will swim in this legal quagmire for many years. Finding an appropriate balance between the protection of individual privacy and bona fide business uses of “public” data will almost certainly be a growing challenge to the moral and legal minds of our community.
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