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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I'm surprised that your students don't seem to be reading your blog.. then they should know better!

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gwern's avatar

> Last year, commenters’ main complaint was that it is impossible guarantee privacy. And this is true. In principle, any piece of info you publish about someone could be the last little clue someone else needs to uncover a great secret about them.

In principle? The research on de-anonymizing large data sets has gone a lot further than 'in principle'. I found a ton of papers and results when I spent an hour or two reading on the topic for http://www.gwern.net/Death%...

If you want to argue the results will be more useful than damaging, fine, but don't try to handwave away the damage as merely theoretical. That's as dishonest as advocates of regulation ignoring prevented gains and only counting prevented losses.

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