More than 90% of “anonymous users” can be identified easily

One of the ways that companies like Facebook and Google are able to make their users OK with the fact that the companies gather vast amounts of data on them is by assuring them that none of this information can be used to identify them. However, even without things like names and addresses, researchers have found that they can discover who this “anonymous data” belongs to about 90% of the time.

Big data — huge data sets that are often made publicly available to anyone who wants to analyze it — are supposed to be anonymous. The idea is to leave out key pieces of information about the people involved, such as name or home address, and leave only the larger trends. But such specifics are not needed to reveal exactly who you are, according to researchers who were able to identify “anonymous” participants in a big data set 90% of the time. The study — published in the journal Science — posits that researchers were able to identify “anonymous” shoppers from a big-data set based on credit card metadata: vague things such as the type of venue (a gym, for example) or the amount spent on a purchase.