
What the data miners are digging up about you  - makimaki
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16162-what-the-data-miners-are-digging-up-about-you.html
======
randomwalker
"Databases know more about you than you realise. A Carnegie Mellon University
study recently showed that simply by knowing gender, birth date and postal zip
code, 87% of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name."

Umm, that was back in 2001. The research has come a long way since then. This
is what I do for a day job (studying privacy leaks in databases), and IMO it's
worse than you might think. Example: <http://33bits.org/about/netflix-paper-
home-page/>

And here's something from two weeks ago: <http://33bits.org/2008/11/12/57/>

~~~
patio11
I think that blog's "About" page is one of the best pieces of academic writing
I've ever seen, on a per-word basis:

>> This is a blog about my research on privacy and anonymity. The title refers
to the fact that there are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only
need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to
determine who they are.

This fact has two related consequences. First, a lot of traditional thinking
about anonymous data relied on the fact that you can hide in a crowd that’s
too big to search through. That notion completely breaks down given today’s
computing power: as long as the bad guy has enough information about his
target, he can simply examine every possible entry in the database and select
the best match.

The second consequence is that 33 bits is not really a lot. If your hometown
has 100,000 people, then knowing your hometown gives me 16 bits of entropy
about you, and only 17 bits remain. But the real danger is that information
about a person’s behavior, which was traditionally not considered personally
identifying, can be used to cause serious privacy breaches in a variety of
different contexts. >>

~~~
randomwalker
well, that's me, so thank you!

------
Hexstream
"Microsoft has filed patents for technology that monitors the heart rate,
blood pressure, galvanic skin response, facial expressions of office workers,
and even their brain waves.

The idea, the patents say, is to let managers know if workers are experiencing
heightened frustration or stress."

 _Consultant to Boss: As you can see on this graph compiled from brainwave
data, your employees are experiencing heightened frustration from the fact
we're monitoring their brainwaves._

~~~
yters
I wonder if Scott Adams peruses this site for strip ideas.

