Researchers have once again shown that it is possible to identify people through anonymised data sets.
Data scientists from London’s Imperial College and the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium estimated that “99.98 percent of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any data set using 15 demographic attributes.”
In 2017 University of Melbourne (UoM) researchers were able to easily re-identify patients in the Medicare and pharmaceutical benefits schemes in data sets released to the public in 2016, using existing information such as their year of birth and medical procedures.
This could lead to legal trouble for companies and organisations that use this information for commercial purposes or for public use.
Check out this article by Juha Saarinen for more details:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/easily-re-identified-anonymised-data-threatens-privacy-528657