Comments on: Myths and Fallacies of “Personally Identifiable Information”

By: Arvind

Arvind — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:39:51 +0000

Thanks! That’s interesting. I will give it a more thorough read when I get a chance.

By: Alvaro Del Hoyo

Alvaro Del Hoyo — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:44:21 +0000

May be this document is of your interest…does not resolve the problem in any case ;-p

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2007/wp136_en.pdf

By: Alvaro Del Hoyo

Alvaro Del Hoyo — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:00:34 +0000

Arvind,

Thank you so much.

In Europe we have same problem. We have a pair of legal concepts that matches your concept of personal identifiable information.

Art.2.a Directive 95/46/CE

‘personal data’ shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;

In Spain there is an exception: such identification -of the identifiable person- should not require disproportionate periods of time or activities, whatever these means.

But, what is our economic, cultural or social identity? Being classified as high, mid, low per year incomes , even if error is feasible? Being classified as illiterate or not? Our nickname or avatar on social networks or online game communities?

Really funny pair of legal concepts.

According to UE law, guess online advertising companies, as any stakeholder in online activities are treating personal data just because traffic data treatment and/or cookie deployment.

Apparently there is no need to use 33 bits of entropy formula to apply.

What do you think? ;-p

Regards

By: Jeff Granger

Jeff Granger — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:01:22 +0000

Yep. Works ok now. Thanks.

By: Arvind

Arvind — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:34:24 +0000

Thanks for your comment. The link should work — webservers generally ignore extra slashes. It does work for me. But for good measure I’ve removed the slash. Let me know if it works for you now.

By: Jeff Granger

Jeff Granger — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:28:53 +0000

Hi Arvind,

This is an interesting article. In my company’s experience it is a common misconception that simple de-identification of data protects privacy.

[One thing - your link to the PDF is broken. It references http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users//shmat/shmat_cacm10.pdf, which has one too many slashes.]

All the best,

Jeff