View From Planet Jamie

Arvind Narayanan and Dr Vitaly Shmatikov’s paper “De-anonymising social networks” reveals some very disturbing information:

“The main lesson of this paper is that anonymity is not sufficient for privacy when dealing with social networks. We developed a generic re-identification algorithm and showed that it can successfully de-anonymize several thousand users in the anonymous graph of a popular microblogging service (Twitter), using a completely different social network (Flickr) as the source of auxiliary information.

Furthermore, any of the thousands of third-party application developers, the dozens of advertising companies, governments who have access to telephone call logs have access to auxiliary information which is much richer than what we used in our experiments. At the same time, an ever growing number of third parties get access to sensitive social-network data in anonymized form.

These two trends appear to be headed for a collision resulting in major privacy breaches, and any potential solution would appear to necessitate a fundamental shift in business models and practices and clearer privacy laws on the subject of Personally Identifiable [...]