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87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

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Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#21

Post by Zimahl »

simonw wrote: post #17
Zimahl wrote: post #13

Putting it to a non-scientific test, where I grew up is within the zip code of 98632. From the 2000 census there are 47,202 within that zip code. This is probably a good average city for America - not too big, not too small. Based on the fact that there are 366 possible (year excluded) birthdays (I'm including Feb. 29th) and only two genders, just about the best I can do for uniquely identifying people in that county…

Your calculations would be very different if you included the year in the DOB.

I didn't at first to show the 1:64, and then I added the year (well 50 of them) to show how I got closer to the 87% with my extremely un-scientific and fuzzy math.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#23

Post by xxbondsxx »

kingkilr wrote: post #7

There were no other males, born on october 8th 1990, in Lakeview, Chicago. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be frank.

Birth location =/= mailing address zipcode. Babies are usually born in hospitals, and thus parents from many areas concentrate in one specific building. When you re-distribute these births out to their respective homes around the county, the zip code becomes much more important.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#24

Post by Zimahl »

koenigdavidmj wrote: post #16
Zimahl wrote: post #13

Putting it to a non-scientific test, where I grew up is within the zip code of 98632. From the 2000 census there are 47,202 within that zip code. This is probably a good average city for America - not too big, not too small. Based on the fact that there are 366 possible (year excluded) birthdays (I'm including Feb. 29th) and only two genders, just about the best I can do for uniquely identifying people in that county…

Longview probably just has the one zip code. Seattle has 59, for just over 10000 average per zip code, so we up here are probably a bit worse in a big city.

Worse or better? With only 10k per zip you'd get very close to a 100% unique identifier.

I realized after looking at both Portland and Seattle zip codes that they seem to be distributed better than the less dense areas so you do have very few zip codes over 20k.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#25

Post by firemanx »

xxbondsxx wrote: post #23
kingkilr wrote: post #7

There were no other males, born on october 8th 1990, in Lakeview, Chicago. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be frank.

Birth location =/= mailing address zipcode. Babies are usually born in hospitals, and thus parents from many areas concentrate in one specific building. When you re-distribute these births out to their respective homes around the county, the zip code becomes much more important.

In towns like mine, however, 40,000 people share the same zip code with the hospital. I'm sure there are quite a few more town like mine throughout the US.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#26

Post by masterzora »

thisuser wrote: post #22

Medical and voting records generally ask for sex, not gender. It would be nice if the two concepts would stop being confused.

I agree. That said, using actual gender rather than assigned sex only serves to identify people more uniquely. I wonder if that would have an appreciable effect on the stats or if it would fall within error bars.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#27

Post by kingkilr »

xxbondsxx wrote: post #23
kingkilr wrote: post #7

There were no other males, born on october 8th 1990, in Lakeview, Chicago. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be frank.

Birth location =/= mailing address zipcode. Babies are usually born in hospitals, and thus parents from many areas concentrate in one specific building. When you re-distribute these births out to their respective homes around the county, the zip code becomes much more important.

I used my mailing address zipcode, without even realizing it wasn't my birth zipcode :)

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#28

Post by masterzora »

lmkg wrote: post #6
mikey_p wrote: post #2

While I find this fascinating, I'm sure this is old news to people in the business, like the people that run the grocery/chain store savings programs. What I'd be really interested to see is why this works, and what it tells us about distribution of population by zip code. I'd imagine the places where this doesn't work as well, are the most densely populated zip codes, where the likely hood of duplicates on the given…

Birth date is pretty granular as well. A quick trip to the interwebs gives about 11k-12k people born each day, or 6k of each gender. There are 100k possible ZIP codes. The birth dates aren't evenly distributed, but they're reasonably close. The ZIP codes probably have a lot of clumping, but in dense urban areas they usually start cutting the areas into smaller pieces. The long tail of ZIP codes is probably well-popul…

Point of interest: there are 100K possible ZIP codes but only 42K-ish are actually in use in the US. Not that I think this makes it unreasonable for 5K of each to land unique ZIPs.

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#29

Post by [deleted] »

masterzora wrote: post #26
thisuser wrote: post #22

Medical and voting records generally ask for sex, not gender. It would be nice if the two concepts would stop being confused.

I agree. That said, using actual gender rather than assigned sex only serves to identify people more uniquely. I wonder if that would have an appreciable effect on the stats or if it would fall within error bars.

[deleted]

Re: 87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DOB, gender, zip}

#30

Post by billybob »

masterzora wrote: post #26
thisuser wrote: post #22

Medical and voting records generally ask for sex, not gender. It would be nice if the two concepts would stop being confused.

I agree. That said, using actual gender rather than assigned sex only serves to identify people more uniquely. I wonder if that would have an appreciable effect on the stats or if it would fall within error bars.

You'd have to have a pretty long dropdown menu in the data-mining centers for all the genders people self-identify these days. Some people might be uniquely identifiable on that value alone.
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