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."

Comments

truly anonymous data is often useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you are in a medical study and there is some measurement like blood chemsitry, spinal tap, imaging (MRI, CT etc) .. which is to be tracked over time to figure out if a drug works or not. If the data is really anonymous then you can't know the time trajectory and you can't do the study. Moral of the story: strict anonymity sounds good, but be careful what you wish for.