Hacker News Reader

> By default this means the day and month of birth and your initials, unless you share those among many other citizens. In that case, more data may be added

This sounds like k-anonymity, in which case the k is usually made public. Any idea what value they chose?

View on HN

It's the opposite isn't it? k-anonymity would remove data until you are the same as k others, whereas this adds data (such as first name), so you are not the same as many others?

There's the privacy-utility tradeoff in data anonymisation, but most algorithms focus primarily on privacy. There usually are no parameters that promise any kind of utility, only parameters that promise privacy.

In this case it looks like they want a guarantee on both, which makes sense.

(So yeah, you're right, this definitely isn't just k-anonymity)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com