Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
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Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#32The pile on continues... (1) This is probably a project by a small "research" group at Facebook. The goal of that group is probably to publish papers in a Psych journal or something like that about how they were able to correlate anonymized medical data with Facebook feed updates. Tech companies have these research groups for prestige, they are not central to the company mission. (2) According to the article, the pro…
It sounds to me like the researcher wanted to use this data to identify at-risk groups and get them preventive care. I don't mean "identify" as in, de-anonymize them, but to use data to figure who may need help (or advertised to -- same difference really). This actually sounds like a good idea if that's the purpose. It's not any different than retailers identifying cohorts they can sell to. It also sounds very simila…
Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#33The pile on continues... (1) This is probably a project by a small "research" group at Facebook. The goal of that group is probably to publish papers in a Psych journal or something like that about how they were able to correlate anonymized medical data with Facebook feed updates. Tech companies have these research groups for prestige, they are not central to the company mission. (2) According to the article, the pro…
It sounds to me like the researcher wanted to use this data to identify at-risk groups and get them preventive care. I don't mean "identify" as in, de-anonymize them, but to use data to figure who may need help (or advertised to -- same difference really). This actually sounds like a good idea if that's the purpose. It's not any different than retailers identifying cohorts they can sell to. It also sounds very simila…
Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#34The pile on continues... (1) This is probably a project by a small "research" group at Facebook. The goal of that group is probably to publish papers in a Psych journal or something like that about how they were able to correlate anonymized medical data with Facebook feed updates. Tech companies have these research groups for prestige, they are not central to the company mission. (2) According to the article, the pro…
According to the article the reason for why it was never actually started was because of the "Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal". Very important distinction.
Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#35The pile on continues... (1) This is probably a project by a small "research" group at Facebook. The goal of that group is probably to publish papers in a Psych journal or something like that about how they were able to correlate anonymized medical data with Facebook feed updates. Tech companies have these research groups for prestige, they are not central to the company mission. (2) According to the article, the pro…
I don't think it's a non-story.
At least for me it reinforces my reading of this company's attitude and hangling of their user's (and the population's) privacy.
It's a datapoint. It's not everything, but it's not nothing either.
Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#36Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#37> Facebook proposed using a common computer science technique called "hashing" to match individuals who existed in both sets But Facebook has the source data from which hashes were generated so they can alway reverse them. Furthermore, if you take a hash from name and surname, it can be easily reversed because the set of names and surnames is relatively small.
Not if you use salt.
The problem is that the number of inputs is limited and it's trivial to enumerate over the input values. Let's take a contrived example: We have the data of a small, entirely made-up island where only two families live, so we have two surnames. Let's name them Foo and Bar. Now, they have an entirely funny tradition, they all get first names based on the order in which they were born (1). So we have Firstborn, Secondborn. Let's also, for simplicity assume that each couple gets exactly two children. That gives us the following 4 possible combinations of names:
Firstborn Foo
Firstborn Bar
Secondborn Foo
Secondborn Bar
Let's assume that there are 10 million of those people and we hash their names with a salt, that gives us 10 million unique hashes. But to break each hash, we only need to try at most 4 times, that's 40 million tries. Hashing speed varies from hash to hash and the hardware, but good old md5
easily achieved a few million hashes per second on a stock CPU in 2012. GPUs are usually around two orders of magnitude faster (2). So in the worst case, your desktop PC could break all those 40 million hashes in a few seconds without breaking a sweat. Better hashes are slower, but with such a limited input space, even the best hashes are breakable.So no, salt's won't save you here.
(1) This is not entirely fictitious: https://nowiknow.com/wayan-balik/
(2) See for example the hashcat benchmarks http://thepasswordproject.com/oclhashcat_benchmarking and https://blog.codinghorror.com/speed-hashing/
Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#38Can we just put a pause on all the Facebook stories for a while? Lots of fluff pieces with no real content making it to the homepage from outlets that are banking off the current outrage.
Re: Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dislike/disagree with facebook more than most folks, but even I can smell a dead horse being beaten.
For years privacy-minded people have complained about the lack of recognition of privacy issues among the masses. Suddenly, story after story about aspects of Facebook's anti-privacy practices are being read by the public. This will lead to more stories about other data mining entities as well. The more this keeps up, the more concrete privacy issues will be in the minds of many. And yet, HN is full of dismissals. I'…
Isn't that an argument for not having HN filled with these articles?