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NSF Funds Data Anonymization Project
Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers from Purdue University has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation to help fund an ongoing project that's investigating how well current techniques for anonymizing data are working and whether there's a need for better methods. The grant will help to further research from computer scientists and linguists, who are looking at ways in which people can still be identified through textual clues even after explicitly identifiable data has been removed. The Purdue anonymization project has been ongoing for some time, and also includes researchers from a number of other institutions, including Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute."
It works!
Can I pick up my grant check now?
I wonder if they could get a larger grant from Google or Facebook or the NSA or [insert large organization name here] to get a guaranteed result of "things are just fine, nothing to see here"?
This is a sheer waste of money.
You can remove the nominative information but still the data is not anonymous because you can use advanced technique like behaviour analysis to segment your samples back to the individual and then correlate it with some known data about the individual to identify it.
If you remove enough discriminative information (information the enables you to separate your sample into groups) you data start loosing meanings fast. And I don't see how can you have meaningful data if you removed all the information that would enable you to recreate the individual sample.
NSFW?
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
"The grant will help to further research from computer scientists and linguists, who are looking at ways in which people can still be identified through textual clues even after explicitly identifiable data has been removed." SHOULD READ
"The grant will help to further research from computer scientists, linguists, AND the N.S.A. who are looking at ways in which people can still be identified through textual clues even after explicitly identifiable data has been removed."
Yours In Krasnoyarsk,
Kilgore T.
Headline had me thinking the science grants were returned Non Sufficient Funds... thats a sign of a really bad economy.
The research is actually into data mining, not some new forms of encryption/anonymization.
I'm sure the results will provide insight that may lead to better anonymization, but I bet framing the whole thing around the more popular side of that spectrum makes it sell better.
If private enterprise won't fund it, it isn't worth doing. Kill the NSF! Kill the DOE! Privatize NOAA & NIST!
Sincerely,
Citizen Tea
So, is this a good development or a bad development? If the finding better ways to identify people leads to better ways to remove that information then it is better?
Or is it better because it will help us not remain anonymous when we donate to our favorite cause and that organization is in some way involved in US politics?
Panopticlick already showed that it was child's play to track somebody, even with cookies disabled. Unless the way websites/browsers work is fundamentally changed, this will continue to be the case.
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1012208
above is direct link to award
governemnt entity(CIA+NSA)* national security + keylogger or trojan = we ownz all your base (where base = data). Anonymiztion HAH.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
truly anonymous data is often useless
And that differs from fully-attributed data HOW?
can be achieved with conceptual clustering with galois lattices.
You can now send me a cashier's check for the sum of Euro 100,000,000,000.
Thanks in advance.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore T.
For better anonymization, you could run the data though google translate a few times. That'll guarantee that it's anonymized.
1.5 million won't do that much at all! They are going to need alot more that that.
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