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Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

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Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#81

Post by newaccount74 »

willseth wrote: post #50
Xelynega wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do you think "data brokers and ad targets" purchase data from? I don't understand how you could help companies protect the private data they collect from users and think that you're not facilitating the collection and sale of it.

Almost literally every company with human customers collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business. Very few of those have a business model where the purpose is to profit from the sale of that data. Every one of our customers is treating first party data for first party use cases, which is far more common than buying or selling data. How many companies have prod user data and developers that need an up t…

> collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business

That's a lie we developers like to tell ourselves. But the reality is that most companies track data because some sold them software to track data.

It's ridiculous how every single small business website has cookie banners, GDPR consent, and includes multiple tracking scripts on their website to collect all the user data they can get their hands on.

Yet these small businesses have no idea what data they are collecting. The owners are completely clueless. They have all this data collection shit on their website because someone else who has no clue put it there.

They see facebook and google collecting all this data, and think they need to collect data too. But they have no idea what to do with it. At best they look at a few numbers and get a feeling that all the money they spent on their website was worth it.

But it's all bullshit. 90% of businesses don't need invasive tracking, don't know what to do with the collected data, and could save money if they didn't bother to track all that useless data.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#82

Post by [deleted] »

spiffytech wrote: post #13

Every time I hear "anonymous data", I think of that time AOL published anonymized search logs (for academic research). The anonymization was negligent, and an NYT reporter de-anonymized and tracked down one of the users with the local & personal info present in the search queries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release https://web.archive.org/web/20130404175032/http://www.nytime...

[deleted]

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#83

Post by Godel_unicode »

orbital-decay wrote: post #66
jruohonen wrote: post #2

A good popular take, but they, either intentionally or out of ignorance, omit newer, proven techniques like differential privacy.

Differential privacy does not anonymize your data. It's a (mathematically solid) instrument to make it coarse enough to only give up the part you want. The EFF is completely correct in their assessment - there's no way to make your data anonymous and usable by the third party at the same time. The root issue lies elsewhere. There's FHE, which does allow your data to be processed without accessing it, but it has prohi…

> there's no way to make your data anonymous and usable by the third party at the same time. The

This is absurd hyperbole, here’s a trivial proof. The US population is 51.1% female. If you live in the US your gender information is included in this data point, but it cannot be de-anonymized. It is however useful for determining TAM for many products.

Anonymity is a spectrum, and there are many points along that spectrum which are solutions to usable data which also respects privacy.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#84

Post by deafpolygon »

lsh123 wrote: post #63

As others pointed out, the article mixes a lot of things together. EU (GDPR) has very specific and very hard to meet anonymization bar (tldr; it requires anonymization to be at the level where it’s mathematically improbable to de-anonymize the user). None of the “anonymization” examples in the article would pass this EU bar.

And yet this does not prevent anyone from doing it in the EU.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #59
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've answered your own questions and kind of defeated your own point here: > Meanwhile, somebody looking to harm the user would need to already know quite a lot about that user before they could make any use out of such a thing. The one thing I see EFF did wrong in this article is, they picked a bad quote to start with. That line from Matt Blaze, it's almost a pure tautology. There's a better line (though I don't k…

> You say "somebody" would need to already know a lot about the user to make use of your database. But from my perspective - perspective of the user - that "somebody" could just as well be your company Well yes, noticing problems in these databases and providing consulting towards their mitigation (ideally before the pain shows up) is more or less what we're selling. Some degree of analysis must remain possible becau…

I understand your point and I agree with it within its scope, however I want to reinforce the point often missed by data handlers: you're talking about tradeoffs involved in doing the thing, whereas we (the users) are saying, don't do the thing. Anonymization may be a spectrum of trade-offs, but for the side EFF represents here, the two issues are: 1) that companies do the thing that makes anonymization a meaningful concept in the first place, and then 2) use one end of the spectrum to sell this to the public, while actually sitting on the opposite end of that spectrum.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#86

Post by lsh123 »

deafpolygon wrote: post #84
lsh123 wrote: post #63

As others pointed out, the article mixes a lot of things together. EU (GDPR) has very specific and very hard to meet anonymization bar (tldr; it requires anonymization to be at the level where it’s mathematically improbable to de-anonymize the user). None of the “anonymization” examples in the article would pass this EU bar.

And yet this does not prevent anyone from doing it in the EU.

I can’t speak for everyone, but the company I work for takes this very seriously and does its best to comply with the law. Said that, all of it is very complicated. Most (if not all) privacy problems I observed so far are caused not by malice but by incompetence. And those get fixed as soon as found.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#87

Post by JohnFen »

c0pium wrote: post #75
genewitch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the interest of charitable-ness, can you define "noise" and explain how rudimentary denoising algorithms that have existed since the 1960s can't penetrate it? Time and time again people think they've anonymized data and they're always proven incorrect. Just come to grips with the fact you're participating in the sale of my (or whoever's) private data. Hope you sleep well!

> they're always proven incorrect This is pretty obvious survivorship bias. You think that they’re wrong because you only hear about the cases when they were. There are tons of examples of breaches where the anonymization held up, it’s just that it’s not interesting so nobody talks about it.

Umm, yes?

If I have a lock on my door that successfully prevented 99 people from breaking in, but one skilled lockpicker subverted it, then my lock has failed.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#88

Post by JohnFen »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #61
SenAnder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replaces every string in the customer's database with a cryptographic hash [..] So unless your city is named "success", it's going to be missing from the dataset. I'm not sure I understand. Wouldn't it be trivial to hash the name of every known city, thereby reversing your cryptographic hash? As is done for passwords, only with a much smaller space of possibilities.

They are salted hashes. Also, I chose city out of thin air. Realistically the column names are generic, "output", "input" things like that. So you'd also have to guess that this particular user is putting city data in their outputs before you'd be able to run the "known cities" attack.

But remember rule #1 of data security: if there is a way to access the data legitimately, there is a way to access it illegitimately. The only question is the amount of time and effort required to do so.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#89

Post by JohnFen »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #83
orbital-decay wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Differential privacy does not anonymize your data. It's a (mathematically solid) instrument to make it coarse enough to only give up the part you want. The EFF is completely correct in their assessment - there's no way to make your data anonymous and usable by the third party at the same time. The root issue lies elsewhere. There's FHE, which does allow your data to be processed without accessing it, but it has prohi…

> there's no way to make your data anonymous and usable by the third party at the same time. The This is absurd hyperbole, here’s a trivial proof. The US population is 51.1% female. If you live in the US your gender information is included in this data point, but it cannot be de-anonymized. It is however useful for determining TAM for many products. Anonymity is a spectrum, and there are many points along that spectr…

Privacy is a spectrum, anonymity is not.

Re: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

#90

Post by willseth »

newaccount74 wrote: post #81
willseth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost literally every company with human customers collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business. Very few of those have a business model where the purpose is to profit from the sale of that data. Every one of our customers is treating first party data for first party use cases, which is far more common than buying or selling data. How many companies have prod user data and developers that need an up t…

> collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business That's a lie we developers like to tell ourselves. But the reality is that most companies track data because some sold them software to track data. It's ridiculous how every single small business website has cookie banners, GDPR consent, and includes multiple tracking scripts on their website to collect all the user data they can get their hands on. Yet th…

If you have a name, address, and phone number associated with a customer account, then you have collected PII. Good luck avoiding that.

User tracking actually requires linking to associate online activities with user personas. Anonymization systems are designed to break linking.

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