Ars has just one question for PhD student Arvind Narayanan and his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov: why must you continually shatter our illusions? Despite the all-seeing, all-knowing panopticon that is the Internet, some of us like to dream our simple dreams of anonymity and privacy; we choose to believe that our Netflix movie recommendations do not identify us; and we hold on to the belief that we can remain comfortably anonymous behind the veil of our Pumpalumpkin Twitter account.
But like the yapping Toto at the end of the Wizard of Oz, Narayanan and Shmatikov take delight in ripping back the curtain, exposing the great and terrible Oz as nothing more than a scrawny academic.
Their newest paper, “De-anonymizing social networks,” is yet another attack on the idea that data can be easily anonymized by stripping out a few bits of personally identifiable information (PII). Much of their work over the last few years is built on the premise that PII extends far beyond names and addresses; in many datasets, the very structure of the data provides all sorts of clues that can be deciphered with only a few bits of information.
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