not so anonymous

["David Farber" <dave () farber net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dean F. Sutherland [mailto:dfsuther () cs cmu edu] 
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2007 11:35 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: for IP? Fwd: [read20-l] not so anonymous

For IP if you like.

Dean F. Sutherland
dfsuther () cs cmu edu

"He that publisheth not a sufficiency, he shall perish: yea, all  
grants shall be refused him, his contract shall not be renewed, he  
shall vanish from the sight of his fellows even unto the depths of the  
teacher's colleges, and his name shall vanish from the footnotes." --  
source unknown

Begin forwarded message:

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject:      [read20-l] not so anonymous
> Date:         Sun, 23 Dec 2007 14:21:26 -0800
> From:         Peter Brantley <peebsley () gmail com>
> Reply-To:     Peter Brantley <peebsley () gmail com>
> Organization:         Digital Library Federation
> To:   Read20 List <read20-l () lists panix com>
>
>
>
> recently, netflix released some anonymized usage data in order
> to seed a technical challenge (on recommending algorithms).
>
> bruce schneier reports that a team of Univ. of Texas researchers
> de-anonymized a subset of the data through correlation with public
> IMdB (internet movie database) entries.
>
> bruce extends this by analogy to point how easy this really is
> and he notes the obvious analogy to book purchasing habits:
>
> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/anonymity_and_t_2.html
>
> "Someone with access to an anonymous dataset of telephone records,
> for example, might partially de-anonymize it by correlating it
> with a catalog merchants' telephone order database. Or Amazon's
> online book reviews could be the key to partially de-anonymizing
> a public database of credit card purchases, or a larger database
> of anonymous book reviews.
>
> "Google, with its database of users' internet searches, could
> easily de-anonymize a public database of internet purchases, or
> zero in on searches of medical terms to de-anonymize a public
> health database. Merchants who maintain detailed customer and
> purchase information could use their data to partially de-anonymize
> any large search engine's data, if it were released in an
> anonymized form. A data broker holding databases of several
> companies might be able to de-anonymize most of the records in
> those databases.
>
> "What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this
> process isn't hard, and doesn't require a lot of data. It turns out
> that if you eliminate the top 100 movies everyone watches, our
> movie-watching habits are all pretty individual. This would
> certainly hold true for our book reading habits, our internet
> shopping habits, our telephone habits and our web searching habits."
>
>
> ________________________________________
> read20-l : sponsored by Panix in New York City



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