Feds crack down hard on selling of personal data without consent

cnn.com

26 points·Bender··5 comments

So when are the major credit bureaus going to get charged?

> it also forced the company to either delete all of its previously collected location data or to take steps to anonymize it.

Unless they are closely supervising the anonymization, then it is just for show. There are so many “anonymization” methods that make it trivial to de-anonymize data.

> In addition to banning InMarket from selling or licensing the data, it also forced the company to either delete all of its previously collected location data or to take steps to anonymize it.

It is impossible to anonymize location data.

Sure you can: Just quantize each point to a box that includes the earth and moon, and the timestamp to the nearest even century. Then randomly subsample to a predetermined number of data points.

(I agree with your sentiment though: There’s no way to anonymize location data without destroying its utility.)

The current state of the art in anonymization is Differential Privacy [1], and its application to location data is exactly as you suggest: quantize each point, introduce noise, and then aggregate. The thing is that you can choose the amount of noise you want to introduce to trade off privacy vs. accuracy, making it not all-or-nothing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

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