[Novalug] Driverless vehicles [LONG] [was: Phone metadata (perhaps OT)]

Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org
Sun Feb 25 11:48:55 EST 2018


On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 05:01:52PM -0500, James Ewing Cottrell III via Novalug wrote:
> There are people (well, mathematicians, anyway) at the Census Bureau whose
> job it is to Randomize the Data with the goal of obscuring the PII while
> still allowing it to be used for Statistical Purposes.
> 
> They do this by swapping various fields in the data until the data is
> totally scrambled.

I really hope this isn't what they do.  There are known attacks against
this method that leverage publicly-available [1] databases to partially
or completely deanonymize the data.  Some of them are computationally
expensive, as in O(N^2) or worse, but not all of them are.

---rsk

[1] Where "publicly-available" might mean (a) deliberately published or
(b) accidentally published or (c) hacked and published or (d) hacked
and accidentally published (e) hacked and non-published, but available.



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