Anonymous data is a very important part of the internet. It is used to help understand a lot of different aspects of human society, with one of the most important uses being in the field of scientific research. The most important functions that anonymous data serves is that it is harvested by a lot of tech companies and then sold to marketing firms, and the crazy thing is that all of us have agreed to have our data sold like this by agreeing to the terms and conditions of various services and aoos, and these platforms promise that the data will be used anonymously.
However, a team of researchers from Imperial College London as well as Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium tried to figure out just how anonymous this information truly was, and it turns out that using a simple machine learning algorithm they were able to use a few clues to pinpoint a lot of information regarding the person that the aforementioned anonymous data originated from.
The fact of the matter is that even though your data is anonymous, demographic attributes are still clearly visible, and using these attributes which includes things like someone’s age, their general location, their marital status as well as a wide variety of other bits of data these researchers found that 99% of Americans could be identified using so called anonymous data.
This just goes to show what an unsafe place the internet can be, and proves that you need to be ever vigilant in guarding your data to ensure that it can’t be used by some kind of malicious third party.
Photo: HYWARDS / Getty Images
Read next: Two-Third Of The People Think It Is Impossible To Achieve Online Privacy (Survey)
However, a team of researchers from Imperial College London as well as Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium tried to figure out just how anonymous this information truly was, and it turns out that using a simple machine learning algorithm they were able to use a few clues to pinpoint a lot of information regarding the person that the aforementioned anonymous data originated from.
The fact of the matter is that even though your data is anonymous, demographic attributes are still clearly visible, and using these attributes which includes things like someone’s age, their general location, their marital status as well as a wide variety of other bits of data these researchers found that 99% of Americans could be identified using so called anonymous data.
This just goes to show what an unsafe place the internet can be, and proves that you need to be ever vigilant in guarding your data to ensure that it can’t be used by some kind of malicious third party.
Photo: HYWARDS / Getty Images
Read next: Two-Third Of The People Think It Is Impossible To Achieve Online Privacy (Survey)
