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Posts Tagged ‘Anonymity’

On Being Personally Identifiable

September 15th, 2009
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an informative article called What Information is “Personally Identifiable”? I was surprised to learn that if I know your gender, zip code, and birthday, there’s a high likelihood that I know exactly who you are.

Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. If you live in the United States, there’s an 87% chance that you don’t share all three of these attributes with any other U.S. resident. Second, there may be particular data sources available (Sweeney used a Massachusetts voter registration database) that let people do searches to bootstrap what they know about someone in order to learn more — including traditional identifiers like name and address. In a very concrete sense, “anonymized” or “merely demographic” information about people may be neither.

Coaching moment: Think of how many grocery store, membership applications, and online accounts have your name, zip code, gender and birth date. Many of the contractual terms that we agree to when we apply for these services make reference to how the company plans to use their data. In some cases, they claim to use “aggregated data” which does not identify us by name. However, if we put a few of these databases together (you know this is happening, right?), there’s a lot of data available about us. Specifically.

Think about who is asking for your data, and what need they might have for it. I encourage you to think more critically about your data sharing practices. It might not be safe to think that anonymized data stays that way.

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What Data Can Show

September 4th, 2009
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This video is an interesting romp through time, illustrating special effects and what can be shown visually. What does this have to do with digital identity? Several things:

  • The world is not always as it appears
  • Some people want you to see the world in a particular (non-real) way
  • You can show the world who you are in a particular (real or non-real) way
  • A personal identity is an interpretive dance between the person offering and the person accepting or using some information
  • Not all information (like details of how the effects were created) needs to be revealed

Coaching moment: You are, at some points in time and in certain circumstances, the director, designer, and special effects creator of your own life. You can choose what to show, what to withhold, and what parts of you become the picture that others see. For example, you may not choose to talk about last night’s bar crawl when you’re at work, being a model employee. You may choose to reveal more information about your activities to your doctor, in order to assist an appropriate diagnosis. You may choose to portray indifference and anonymity to an annoying panhandler on the street.

What happens when someone else follows you around, blowing your cover? That’s what many companies are doing now when they collect and trade your data. These companies are saying, in effect, “we know who you are, you can not hide from us.” However, what they “know” may not be true or accurate. See, for example, What the Internet Knows About You – a site that says you’ve “visited” URLs that may have only shown up on your visited pages as advertising or invisible pixels. Or take a look at your annual credit card summary to see that your favorite local hardware store is categorized as a “specialty foods” (or some other clearly erroneous) category.

Why might you care about this? Many of these companies and related trading partners are making decisions about you based on this information. They are not asking you to verify–nor are you given the opportunity to refute–inaccurate or incorrect information. Is this the kind of decision making that you want to be steering your life? (I don’t.) This is a version of making decisions about your finances based on identity theft, or about your insurability based on someone else’s records.

What can you do about it? First: be aware of this practice. Choose to work with businesses that are collaborative and will help you verify your data. There aren’t many of them yet. As they show up in the marketplace, they will need your support. Second: order a credit report from any (each) of the big three data companies. Correct what’s wrong. Know what they say. Third: Talk with your friends about this. You may be interested to learn who cares and who does not. Ultimately this is your priority, not someone else’s.

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