Blog: David Loshin

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Anonymization and Identifiability

AOL admits their goof in publishing huge amounts of search data that is questionably anonymized. The New York Times describes some details of the person identified through analysis of the released search data, as was reported in Martin McKeay's blog entry.

I always have a dual reaction to the uproar over the privacy issues associated with the release of this kind of data. First, I am amused that a big company like AOL doesn't have the governance controls in place to assess the public's reaction to the publication of what might be considered sensitive data. The second is surprise that "The Public" is concerned over the exposure of what they suddenly consider to be private information, when in fact the privacy policy states that the data may be presented to others in a nonidentifiable way ("(others) ...receive aggregate data about groups of AOL Network users, but do not receive information that personally identifies you"

Of course, AOL thought that the released data was presented in a way that did not personally identify anyone. The fact that others are able to extract identifiable information from presumably anonymized data should be a wake up call to AOL to review how their governance practices are deployed to ensure they are abiding by their own policies.

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