The article I chose argues that supposedly anonymous data collected and stored by a variety of entities is actually quite easy to connect back to its original source. Often a savvy individual can trace anonymous data to the person from whom it came with as little as a birthdate, a zip code and the individual’s sex. Most current laws dealing with the anonymization of data, however, only specify the removal of “unique” identifiers such as names, addresses, usernames, IP addresses, etc. If the stored data is your Netflix rental history, you might be slightly concerned that your friends or co-workers might discover you’ve rented “Weekend at Bernie’s III” eight times this year. But what if the data was your health records? Or worse? The article is an especially good read for this course because it argues that any changes to privacy laws designed to address this issue will have to balance the value of privacy (via anonymity) with the ideal of keeping certain data useful from the standpoint of research (sounds like someone has been reading Lessig).
No comments:
Post a Comment