"Anonymous" Facebook Dataset Is Identified as Harvard Students

It is getting easy to break anonymous datasets with mining:

Netflix: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105 AOL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/07/aol-this-was-a-screw-up...

thanks.. the netflix thing was me and my advisor.

i've started a blog around our anonymity breaking research: http://33bits.org/

we've been working on breaking anonymity in social networks for a year or two now. we'll have more to say soon.

Yet another reason to really re-think being "anonymous" online or the supposed safety in numbers of "aggregate data". Smart folks like you understand that we have digital fingerprints that extend beyond any one platform.

This reminds of zero knowledge proofs...

When will people learn that any anonymous datasets don't stay that way for long on the internet?