27.01.2017 - 16:50 [ Techdirt ]

One More Time With Feeling: ‚Anonymized‘ User Data Not Really Anonymous

Researchers from Stanford and Princeton universities plan to make this point once again via a new study being presented at the World Wide Web Conference in Perth, Australia this upcoming April. According to this new study, browsing habits can be easily linked to social media profiles to quickly identify users. In fact, using data from roughly 400 volunteers, the researchers found that they could identify the person behind an „anonymized“ data set 70% of the time just by comparing their browsing data to their social media activity: