Cyber Security
Anonymisation: False assumptions and fallacies in data protection and privacy By Jane Lo Singapore Correspondent
"Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both." - Paul Ohm, associate professor of law at University of Colorado Law School, in “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization”.
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n today’s world awash with affordable data storage and processing, “Big Data” has emerged as a powerful approach to optimize decision making, with uses across varying fields. One is the health sciences, where complex and highly dimensional health data combined with behavorial and environmental data are transformed into predictions for more effective patient diagnosis. Another is in financial services, where historical analysis of spending patterns are used to uncover anomalies to highlight potential fraudulent transactions. Others include education, marketing, transportation, and even sports. Developments in Big Data innovations inevitably triggers the debate: how to preserve personal data privacy and yet benefit from the data utility? For many, the logical solution is embracing the seemingly reliable “anonymization” process to protect privacy. We expect that removing (or making small changes to) personal data protect our privacy.
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Personally identifiable information (PII) But advances in technologies mean that the common understanding of “personally identifiable information” (PII) or “personal data”, centering on the obvious such as names, birthdates, easily misses other information not immediately seen as personally identifiable. One example is IP address. Google on its blog, “Are IP addresses personal?” argued that not only these number strings shared in some situations, they are also tied to machines and not humans. Privacy advocates contended that search queries tied to shared IP addresses such as families, or a small office is a privacy threat. Additional online actives such as emailing or e-commerce shopping provide a wealth of information for correlation for the IP addresses. And these correlated pieces of information, which on its own may seem harmless and anonymous, can be linked to an individual. We hear more at the EPIC’s (European Platform for Intelligent Cities) workshop “Privacy Preserving Information Technologies” held in Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research on 10th Dec 2018.
First, what is anonymization and why is it used? To protect individual’s privacy, data is manipulated to make it difficult to identify individuals. This is the process of anonymization. These are various methods of data manipulation – from removal to replacement to generalization, and cryptography. However, case studies illustrated despite these anonymization attempts, individual identities were exposed.
