The observatory of anonymity: a interactive tool to understand re-identification risks in 89 countries
File(s)www-observatory-final.pdf (731.12 KB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Rocher, Luc
Muthu, Meenatchi Sundaram
de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Anonymity offers strong guarantees for people to use technology without fear of mass surveillance, identity theft, and data mis-use. To anonymize and share data widely, de-identification is the main tool used in academia and industry. Yet mounting evidence suggest that de-identification may not protect people’s privacy in practice. We present The Observatory of Anonymity, an interactive website demonstrating how few pieces of personal data can easily re-identify us. Taking advantage of modern web technologies, it al-lows participants to explore their correctness score—the likelihood to be correctly and uniquely identified from their demographics only. Trained on census data from 89 countries, it demonstrates the effectiveness of re-identification attacks on deemed-anonymous data. The website further allows analysts to upload their own data samples to train our machine learning models in real time. The Observatory provides a unique tool for individuals, researchers, and practitioners to assess whether current de-identification practices satisfy the anonymization standards of modern data protection laws such as GDPR and CCPA.
Date Issued
2021-04-19
Date Acceptance
2021-04-01
Citation
WWW '21: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021, 2021, pp.687-689
ISBN
9781450383134
Publisher
ACM
Start Page
687
End Page
689
Journal / Book Title
WWW '21: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021
Copyright Statement
© 2021 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in WWW '21: Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (April 2021) https://doi.org/10.1145/3442442.3458606
Source
WWW ’21 Companion
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2021-04-19
Finish Date
2021-04-23
Coverage Spatial
Ljubljana, Slovenia