October 20, 2009

"Exposed: The Erosion of Privacy in the Internet Era"

Harvard Magazine runs a nice piece discussing the "ambivalence we sometimes feel about new technologies that reveal identifiable personal information."

Latanya Sweeney's research, in particular, is pretty startling: "Fully 87 percent of the United States population is uniquely identified by date of birth, five-digit zip code, and gender, she says: “So if I know only those three things about you, I can identify you by name 87 percent of the time. Pretty cool.”"

Posted by Anupam Chander on October 20, 2009 at 01:16 PM in Digitization | Permalink