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by duncans 1857 days ago
I wrote zeroes to my hard drive. Would you consider the data on my hard drive merely anonymized, or is it deleted?
1 comments

It's deleted because all connections (and meta data) has been erased.

In a database, if you null all fields but keep the entries and their inter table relationship intact, you still have identifiable data up to a certain point.

Imagine you have data of specific people and you only have one person per country, having a user and country relationship, if you null a single data of a specific user, you'll still be able to find the user just by analysing to which country that user was connected + some external information.

This is the classical problem of deriving personal data from statistical reports and why data anonymisatiom is so complex.