Fingerprint collecting platform

Google's data-tracking practices are the subject of a study that found even private web browsing leaves a trace and consumers are being watched everywhere.

npj Digital Medicine - Don’t quote me: reverse identification of research participants in...

So-called ‘anonymous’ data can be easily used to identify everything from our medical records to purchase histories

Working with publicly available metadata from Twitter, a machine learning algorithm was able to identify users with 96.7 per cent accuracy

Nature - Yaniv Erlich shows how research participants can be identified from 'anonymous' DNA.

Academics have scoured Facebook pages in the name of science. But the troves they’ve amassed are sometimes unsecured and now pose a privacy risk.

The rise of evidence-based practices and assessment in libraries in recent years, combined with tying outcomes to future funding and resource allotments, has made libraries more reliant on patron data to determine how to allocate limited resources and funding. Libraries who want to use data for research and analysis but also wanting to protect patron privacy find themselves wondering how to balance these two priorities. This article explores The Seattle Public Library’s attempt to strike the balance between patron privacy and data analysis with the use of a data warehouse with de-identified patron data, as well as implications of data warehouses and de-identification as an option for other libraries.

Knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated.

Heatmap data from Strava has inadvertently revealed the anonymised exercise routines of people working at Area 51, GCHQ and on US military bases in Afghanistan. But, if you know where to look, Strava will also cough up people's full names

It just keeps getting deeper. You can also trivially scrape segments, to get a list of people who travelled a route, and trivially obtain a list of users. #Strava pic.twitter.com/U9DnPsyHUD— Paul D (@Paulmd199) January 28, 2018

A huge database containing vast amounts of revealing data on Americans' everyday lives has been left exposed on Amazon Web Services.

Patrons, Privacy, and Technology in the Library Becky Yoose b.yoose@gmail.com @yo_bj Seattle Tech Solidarity - 12/4/17 Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for inviting me over to talk to you tonight! This talk will go into some of the core tenets of librarianship, particularly intellectual free...

A data collection service called SafeGraph collected 17 trillion location markers for 10 million smartphones during the holiday last year.

Data protection laws are about controlling triangulation, not (just) direct privacy At the end of May 2018, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect in Europe. It cre…

Using code and the web, a data scientist follows two unnamed people and learns just how much our anonymous location data can say about who we are.

Apple has boasted of its use of a cutting-edge data science known as "differential privacy." Researchers say they're doing it wrong.

A journalist and a data scientist secured data from three million users easily by creating a fake marketing company, and were able to de-anonymise many users

Two de-identification methods, k-anonymization and adding a 'fuzzy factor,' significantly reduced the risk of re-identification of patients in a dataset of 5 million patient records from a large cervical cancer screening program in Norway.