Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tacosx 2578 days ago
It's an open secret that many of the "anonymized" datasets that the large tech giants pass around are very easy to de-anonymize. I don't know much about how Apple works, but people who work with Google Ad products and analytics regularly violate the anonymity agreement because it's so financially lucrative to do so and just never tell anyone.

We need to stop mining people for profit while putting minimal or zero privacy protections in place.

1 comments

If that was the case I imagine you could ding Apple on false claims. They pretty prominently claim "Differential Privacy" both in their keynotes and on their website. Their claims are also that data is anonymized before they process it. Other companies have been a lot more vague and hand-wavy about "anonymized" in my experience and you're absolutely right that a lot of anonymized datasets can be de-anonymized by correlation.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/