The article describes how it’s possible to combine data without any personal identifiers with data from other sources to find out pretty much everything about you and what you do.
For users, the prospect of some secret leaking to the public grows as databases proliferate. Here is Ohm’s nightmare scenario: “For almost every person on earth, there is at least one fact about them stored in a computer database that an adversary could use to blackmail, discriminate against, harass, or steal the identity of him or her. I mean more than mere embarrassment or inconvenience; I mean legally cognizable harm. Perhaps it is a fact about past conduct, health, or family shame. For almost every one of us, then, we can assume a hypothetical ‘database of ruin,’ the one containing this fact but until now splintered across dozens of databases on computers around the world, and thus disconnected from our identity. Reidentification has formed the database of ruin and given access to it to our worst enemies.”
Because most data privacy laws focus on restricting personally identifiable information (PII), most data privacy laws need to be rethought. And there won’t be any magic bullet; the measures that are taken will increase privacy or reduce the utility of data, but there will be no way to guarantee maximal usefulness and maximal privacy at the same time.
And that’s why I always post my most nutball rants under the pseudonym “Uncle Dave”.
Funny, I post using chuck.
If you use any of the discount cards at supermarkets, use fake names, addresses and telephone numbers. You still get the discounts.
Forensic data extraction and analysis used to be an arcane art when I practised it many, many years ago.
Apparently it’s now a science, which means any educated person can do it, just by carefully following instructions.
Privacy was sacrificed on the alter of short-term, trans-national corporate profits a long time ago. Fraud costs profits, right?
Just imagine what governments, with totally unlimited resources and no cost/benefit requirements at all, are doing in this field.
You got to be pretty stupid to engage in illegal activities online, stupider still to do it without properly investigating the necessary security measures. Let’s face it, when people start getting involved in shady stuff they get paranoid, the shadier stuff even more paranoid. In a world full of easily hackable wifi connections, it’s not that hard to cover ones tracks.
Here’s an interesting website from MIT. You put your name into it, and it scrapes the internet for your “persona”. Works best if you have a somewhat unique name.
http://personas.media.mit.edu/
#5
Yep, use an Apple MacBook and manually change the Ethernet MAC address and hop onto any old open access point and you are off and flying.
Make sure that you are using a freshly built system with no information on it.
Or you could use a Windows box with VM and boot into Linux.
That’s a good reason for keeping a bunch of old laptops around.
speaking of personal data, this autta give anyone some major pause about electronic medical records.
I was at my Doc’s last week..
when i’m there and start chatting, she no longer scribbles her notes on a pad..she enters them into the hospital DB. (which i do not like at all)
-anyway.. in all the patient records, they have a bank of about 15 radio buttons than can be ticked off various ailments and bad habits, like smoking, drug use, high blood pressure, diabetic, etc etc..
Well..this visit makes the 4th time she has had to go in and uncheck ALL of the radio buttons.
“I hate when then they do that” she said.
-apparently someone is checking off all the buttons whenever someone stops in to fill a script.
if you see your doc in a hospital..and they’ve gone to electronic records..i recommend you check to see if your records are “correct”
(what really sucks is that i’ve started tailor what i say so as to not trigger her “scribbling” (and i’ve told her this outside the office)
i’m not even going to go into the ramifications of all of this.
kinda gives new meaning to hacked data though..
-s
#6 -any good router allows you change the MAC address. this is how is also how i rotate my IP address. -it forces your host to issue a new IP.
-and imo, if your not surfing in a VM, your crazy.
-s
#6 I tried it. Never realized I was an author, professor, on trial for murder, dying in a prison hospital, and born in 1639. Good thing I checked up on myself.
The software is probably what they use to track high school and college term papers. To see if they came for pre-published sources. Too bad they never bothered to do this with certain cheating journalists, in the past. Retooling the code, lets it match up recognizable patterns of personal details, and narrow down the candidates, based on who it has any records of. But I’ll bet it has more false positives, that would be acceptable. The marketing crowd must be desperate for IDs. Reverse data mining them, this way.
I wonder if any of the four credit reporting firms are relying on this junk to fill in the “facts” on us?
I don’t think we have secrets any more.