51–60 of 102 posts
If we want more anonymized datasets, maybe we should be asking for approx. age or year of birth instead. I doubt that most things that ask for DOB need anything more than granular than that.
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…
It turns out that zip codes aren't as populous as you might imagine.
As of the Y2K census, only a dozen zip codes have over 100,000 residents -- 80% of all zip codes have less than 15,000 residents, with the median zip code at 2,500.
(Source: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html )
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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.
I prefer writing Sex: Yes, please
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I had to deal with the converse of the problem when I was working for a company that ran the vehicle smog checking for the state of Illinois. A driver's license id was composed of birthdate, sex, and some location information (I dont remember exactly what) for the reasons mentioned by jdp23 it worked quite well, except for identical twins, who had the same driver's license id. (Registrations ofter were processed by h…
> ...for the state of Illinois. A driver's license id was composed of birthdate, sex, and some location information.... It's worse than that: in Illinois the first four characters of your DL ID are your last name's soundex code.
The ZIP codes in Israel are per-street, not city. Given Israel's population of just under 8M, I believe a very high percentage (95% [1] - http://blog.y3xz.com/post/7846661044/data-mining-the-israeli...
There were no other males, born on october 8th 1990, in Lakeview, Chicago. I'm a little flabbergasted, to be frank.
October 8th is an odd date. Since it's my birthday as well (long before 1990 though) I have taken note that I run across very few with that birthday, let alone early October birthdays. Is it statistically a low-birth month? I'd love to know. On a side note, Happy 21st Birthday in just over a month!
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/business/20leonhardt-table...
Of course February 29th is dead last in frequency. Most early October birthdays are above the median in frequency.
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> ...for the state of Illinois. A driver's license id was composed of birthdate, sex, and some location information.... It's worse than that: in Illinois the first four characters of your DL ID are your last name's soundex code.
Do you have a source for this? I think it's pretty cool and I'm wondering if there's a reasonably centralized place for other states' formats as well.
http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/numbers/dl_us_shared.html
I'd love to see someone with a large dataset containing those variables to see what % of their set overlaps on those.
About a year ago, I did a project for de-duping customer entered contact info. We had less than 100k records for any particular region (Bay Area, New York, etc.) From what I recall, we were able to confirm identity in about 80% of cases using Name, DOB, and zip code. By far the best metric is phone number, that bumped us up over 97%. If the comparison was limited to only three metrics, then we would use Name, DOB, an…
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…
If they have zip+4 info, this gets even easier.
True unique identifiers are immutable. At least two of those three things can be changed.