4 ms·
Ask HN: What are some clever ways data in public domain has been de-anonymized?
- johnloeber 12y agoSemantic analysis of the Federalist Papers[0] comes to mind. It originally was not known which individual author wrote which paper, but stylometric analysis (i.e. word-counting and matching word frequency distributions of the unlabelled papers against those of labelled papers (in which the author was known)) made it reasonably straight-forward to identify the original authors. [0] A set of historical papers of great political importance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers
- NeutronBoy 12y agoI can't recall the article, but there was a case where public data was de-anonymized based on DOB and zipcodes, and it was incredibly successful in a given state.
- alex_sf 12y agoTaxi data from NYC was deanonymized: https://medium.com/@vijayp/of-taxis-and-rainbows-f6bc289679a1 https://medium.com/@vijayp/of-taxis-and-rainbows-f6bc289679a... And then used to identify Muslim drivers: http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2t201h/identifying_muslim_cabbies_from_trip_data_and/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/2t201h/iden... And then used to track celebrities: http://theiii.org/index.php/316/which-celebrity-is-taking-a-taxi-where/ http://theiii.org/index.php/316/which-celebrity-is-taking-a-...