How 10 digits will end privacy as we know it
Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Ari Juels' bio below.
Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending.
The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely.
This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They're enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we'll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads.
A study of 1990 U.S. Census data revealed that 87 percent of the people in the United States were uniquely identifiable with just three pieces of information (PDF): five-digit ZIP code, gender, and date of birth. Internet surfers today spew considerably more information than that. Web sites can pinpoint our geographical locations, computer models, and browser types, and they can silently track us using cookies. Banking sites even confirm our identities by verifying that our log-ins take place at consistent times of day.
Database dossiers, too, carry surprising amounts of identifying information, even when specifically anonymized for privacy. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin last year studied a set of movie-rating profiles from about 500,000 unnamed Netflix subscribers (PDF).
Knowing just a little about a subscriber--say, six to eight movie preferences, the type of thing you might post on a social-networking site--the researchers found that they could pick out your anonymous Netflix profile, if you had one in the set. The Netflix study shows that those 10 deanonymizing digits can hide in surprising places.
Our physical belongings also betray our anonymity by silently calling out identity-betraying digits. Small wireless microchips--often called radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags--reside in car keys, credit cards, passports, building entrance badges, and transit passes. They emit unique serial numbers.
Once linked to our names--when we make credit card purchases, for instance--these microchips enable us to be tracked without our realizing it. One popular book inflames imaginations with the lurid title, "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID."
But wireless microchips also highlight the futility of anonymity protections. To begin with, concerns about RFID tracking miss the forest for the trees. After all, mobile phones are ubiquitous and can be tracked at much longer ranges than standalone chips. Many people have GPS receivers in their phones and are signing up for location-based services, voluntarily (if selectively) disclosing their movements. There's little point in hiding the serial numbers of chips when your mobile phone squeals on you.
Many scientists (including me) have developed antitracking techniques for mobile phones and microchips. Instead of fixed serial numbers, wireless devices can call out changing pseudonyms, such as the rotating license plate numbers on spies' cars in the movies. The problem is that the plates may change, but the car always looks the same. In this regard, chips are like cars.
Scientists at ETH Zurich recently showed how to identify microchips uniquely using radio waves (PDF)--and consequently to see through the disguise of pseudonyms. Their experiments showed that thanks to manufacturing variations, microchips, laptop Wi-Fi cards, and other devices can't help but emit physical "fingerprints"--essentially God-given serial numbers. More digits that we radiate unknowingly.
In the end, we probably won't need to carry anything at all to see our identities betrayed in public spaces. There are already tens of millions of surveillance cameras in public spaces in the United States.
Face recognition software is crude today, but it will improve. Cameras will eventually recognize faces as well as people do. Unlike people, though, they'll have the backing of databases containing millions of faces--or the headshots that so many of us already post online.
Thankfully, despite proliferating sources of those 10 digits that are fatal to anonymity on the Internet and the sidewalk, we can still prevent the world of the film "Minority Report." There are many defensible facets to privacy beyond identity. Even if our names are blazoned forth to all and sundry, we still have the opportunity to safeguard health care and financial data, entertainment preferences, purchase histories, and social interactions.
In this battle, identity theft is a key challenge for technologists and policymakers. The only way to prevent unauthorized access to personal data is to ensure that even when criminals learn the digital constituents of your identity, they can't steal it. Strong authentication will need to fill the gap as the privacy of identities crumbles.
Perhaps the world will be friendlier when in-store advertisements greet you personally, criminals wear "Hello, My Name Is" badges, and the people you meet at parties already have your bio in hand. Facebook, Twitter, and pervasive blogging already augur a society of reflexive exhibitionism and voyeurism. But the technologies that advance us into a world of omniscience will also bring us a step backward.
For years, people aspired to escape small towns for the big city, for the fresh start of an identity without history. The Internet offered similar horizons of freedom. But the society of the small town will soon have us back in its clutches, for good and bad. And on the Internet, everyone will know if you're a dog.
As chief scientist and director of RSA Laboratories, a security research division of EMC, Ari Juels works to bring sparks of invention and insight from RSA's scientists and affiliates to the company as a whole. Ari, who joined RSA in 1996, after receiving a bachelor's degree in Latin literature and mathematics from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, is also author of cryptographic thriller "Tetraktys." 
Last I checked, it was the megaurban slums where all those failures occur. Outside those overgrown islands is where people enjoy a far greater degree of freedom.
Perhaps the good news is that all this interference will finally convince people to leave the dependence of urban life for the freedom of the real world.
Not.
as http://www.provacymatters.nl describes (animation documentary about electronic privacy issues) it is the threat of being
a) labelled and prejudged, which can seriously erode choice and freedom within our digital barrier/emoney society
b) being exposed to crime via careless and unregulated storage of your personal data. there are a phenomanal amount of data theft, leading to identity theft and the resulting fraud.
c) falling foul of future governments that shift societies values beyond your own current thresholds: eg Iran's rounding up hundreds of activists, journalists and intellectuals, via logging and tracking of their opposing beliefs (esp revolutionists)
We have those already (count the digits in your SSN).
re: "Perhaps the good news is that all this interference will finally convince people to leave the dependence of urban life for the freedom of the real world."
This planet could not support 6bn human beings in a purely agrarian (or even semi-agrarian) society. Most of us would starve to death.
My SSN only has 9 digits. (3,486,784,401 unique people). The SSN works for our country, but not the entire planet.
Heh... s'what I get for typing before I had coffee... :)
9 different positions in the number, 10 (0-9) possible values gives you: 9^10 = 3,486,784,401.
Now that's if we use a straight incremental system. The SSN system does not: see http://www.searchbug.com/peoplefinder/invalid-social-security-numbers.aspx for more info on SSN's.
The moral of the story: make sure that the information channel is as noisy and random as possible, and the ability to separate useful information from useless simply disappears. People should simply respond by taking steps to produce more noise.
Sorry Mr. Conspirator, you data is going to be transmitted error free. It may take two or three attempts, but it will get through.
For anyone who has been a member of the military or worked for DoD it's the identifier embedded in your CAC (Common Access Card). It's also your ID in the DEERS system. These IDs are assigned for life and can be looked up online provided you are on a Government workstation.
-Buckwheat
Again, great article!
LOL
In a few years a great number of people in this world are going to have to learn to live a whole new way. THAT will be an interesting bit of history to watch unfold.
How about if I was hiring for a position as an accountant, and you were a finalist. Through various and sundry sources, I was able to pretty easily put together that you, over the past ten years, had filed 5 claims against your employers for issues varying from OSHA violations to harassment.
Do you think that would be a strike against you? Maybe. Do you think you would EVER know that I knew about the claims? Heck no, not in a million years. But the fact that I was able to gather that information at all and put a definite identity behind it WITHOUT YOU EVEN KNOWING ABOUT IT should make you at least wonder.
What I want to hide isn't something illegal, or even something embarassing. It's my checkbook, my bank account, my computer password, my work ID and PIN. Even details I don't mind giving out to friends and family, I don't want the world knowing. Imagine if every telemarketer on the planet knew your home, work, and cell phone numbers? Or if every junk mailer knew your home address? Imagine getting swamped with thousands of junk mailings every day!
Or if that doesn't faze you, then how about the guy who wants to get a credit card, and happily attach the unpaid bill to your personal identification number? He's left with a new entertainment center, and you're left with an unpaid credit card bill that leaves you sunk in debt...
?I?ve Got Nothing to Hide? and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
Or, what if they don't hire you because they find out you're naive?
my socrates note ------ too many secrets
Instead, this is about a) a very small handful of people "knowing" a very large number of other people who do not know each other and b) interacting with them in remote, simplified, steretyping ways (eg, he's a terrorist; he's an ordinary guy).
1. There's nothing new about people having the ability to find out information about you if they really want to.
2. You're paranoid. There are 7 billion people in the world. If there are indeed entities with the power to track your every move they will only do so only if you have given them a reason to (i.e. run afoul of the law). Then you deserve to be observed if not outright removed from society.
3. Most of the means of tracking mentioned in the article provide no connection back to a person's identity. A clever person MAY be able to track the whereabouts of cell phone ID 8223009685144478932 but connecting it to my name requires a completely different set of knowledge and connecting that to my identity (i.e. personal information such as SSN) is an even greater challenge.
4. There are many things you can do to minimize your exposure to an entity that wants to track you but those things require a partial withdrawal from the conveniences of modern society, the value of which usually outweigh the risk of exposure.
The issue is never what is illegal now. It's what the powers that be might decide to make illegal in the future. And how they could use 24/7 tracking to find someone and 'remove them from society' less for legal reasons but for the person being 'inconvenient' to the powers that be.
.
Is it paranoid? Not really, it's happened many times in history that over zealous police decide they don't like someone and make up a crime to detain them. At least then you have the made up crime to disprove and claim innocence. In these cases though, they change the law to label a persecuted group as criminals and make them disappear with no recourse. 'Enemy Combatants' come to mind. The last administration just made people disappear. No judge no jury. It's taken the rule of law to slowly start bringing justice back into the equation but it's an example of what could happen.
great documentary/animation about this very subject by XS4ALL (a large ISP in holland). also available with english subs at youtube
- by freebird1974 September 4, 2009 12:50 PM PDT
- Big Brother is everywhere
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