Is Data De-Identification Dead?: Why the AI Privacy Risk Isn't What It Learns, But What It Figures Out

Is Data De-Identification Dead?: Why the AI Privacy Risk Isn't What It Learns, But What It Figures Out

In 1997, an MIT graduate student named Latanya Sweeney stunned the privacy world by matching publicly available voter rolls with hospital records stripped of names and addresses to identify the supposedly anonymous medical history of the then-governor of Massachusetts. Three years later, she expanded on that finding by demonstrating that 87 per cent of the U.S. population could be uniquely identified using just three data points: ZIP code, date o