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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

The problem is identification of physical persons. Your e-mail is public, but it also identifies you as a person. This is important, because it allows for correlating different data sets.

Touch Surgery sounds like a honest company, so for them this was just some extra burden. But the same law prevents ShadyAdtechCo from getting datasets from several companies and joining them on e-mail column to build a profile of you, without your explicit, informed consent in several places.

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Wouldn't then a hash of your email also identify you as a person? The companies can still build a profile of you if they just agree to use the same hashing function :/

Or even if ShadyAdtechCo just knows what the hashing function is, and has a list of plaintext email addresses to test against – perhaps obtained from one of the datasets they're joining against, or even from crawling the web.

Hashing should be done with salt for precisely that reason.

If you mean a static salt, that could help mitigate against hacks (if the attacker has access to the database but not the code), but where adtech is concerned it's probably more realistic to assume that the datasets they're using were disclosed willingly. If you mean using a different salt for each address, that could work for some use cases, but it wouldn't work for the use case described in the blog post, since Touch Surgery needs to be able to lookup whether a given address is in the database (to see whether they've previously declined an invitation).

It's really no problem to do this. We're using a variation on this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/158400/etc-shadow-h.... The output of crypt (where the input is an email address) is pretty useless if we did suffer a data breach. They'd have to hash every known email address with that salt in order to figure out who had declined an invite from us.

What is the salt based on?

Why is it reasonable to assume they were disclosed willingly? That sounds like a startling assumption and the reverse of the one I'd make.

Without good evidence, you must assume they were disclosed unwillingly.

Couldn't the salt be unique to the requesting account? I would assume that just because a user declined an invitation from one user, they still might want to accept an invitation from a separate user.

IANAL, but specifying how you hash the e-mails (algorithm + salt generation) would be part of your GDPR compliance process.

We'll have to wait til someone got sued into oblivion before we know that

Noone will get sued under the GDPR. That's not how it works.

Article 79 says that each data subject that considers that their rights under GDPR have been violated by a controller or processor has the right to an effective judicial remedy, which may be brought before a court in either the Member State where the data subject resides, or where the controller or processor has an establishment.

This is distinct from administrative and non-judicial remedies.

That sure sounds like suing.

An email address identifies an email address, not a person. More than a few times I've signed up to newsletters with a distribution list address, that maps to n number of actual people behind the group, who may or may not be fixed members of that group.

You could track c_sharp_enthusiasts@myCompany.com, but that is not identifying a person.

In many cases it will identify a person. I have two email addresses, a personal one and a home one, and I don't use any others. In my case this absolutely will identify me, and I would argue that in the vast majority of case this will be true as well. You're unusual relative to the general population in using distribution list addresses, and they have to start somewhere. I would also argue that this is exactly the piece of information that is most commonly used to merge datasets, and that's probably why the legislation includes it.

No one but us computer supernerds makes that distinction. On the consumer market, an email address is an excellent way to identify a person over a very, very, very long time. No one but the tech-literate change their email too often.

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