Comments on: Privacy's random answer

No need to lie about your age online--a math technique will keep your personal data covered, says News.com's Michael Kanellos.

Nefarious use?

If the data is available to anybody, the discussion will be more like
"He's eaten at Carl's Jr. three times in the last month, let's sell him these large size pants. Oh yeah, we'll raise his health insurance premium too."

Randomization

First of all, was my information randomized when I sent it to register with news.com? :-P
But I don't understand, what the point of having statistics at all is, if they're random, to an extent. Doesn't that defeat the purpose?

[unknown unknown]

Reply

The random number added to the data is within a finite range. If you take enough samples, despite having introduced a bit of randomness, it will still come out as approximately normally distributed. In other words they can make inferences about population means using the normal distribution no matter what the distribution of the population being sampled from (the central limit theorem if I remember my statistics).

[malabrm1]

Thank the Lord IBM Understands

Over the years, I've told Amazon that I'm 952 y/o, Yahoo that I'm 6 y/o, and other sites such nonsense just to avoid receiving their spam and tracking codes. So, sue me.

IBM are old-timers at this computing game. I learned programming on the mammoth old IBM 360 at Columbia University, because it was a pre-requisite for courses in Operations Research (applied stat and probability theory, wargames, et al).

Over the past twenty one years, life has taught me how critical those lessons were. IBM wrote the book on how to sidestep invasive info tech. The firm understood the potential threats to personal, corporate and government security, and potential abuse of basic civil liberties; all of this, before 1975.

Well done, Big Blue, as always... .

[malabrm1]

BTW...Re: CNET...

You can rest assurd this site is as cool as it comes about respecting your privacy.

I have found that they could care less about your websurfing habits in the years I've enjoyed their fine publication.

All they care about is staying on top of their game as journalists.

And as journalists, the firm has no competition, and sides with no particular organizations; advertizer or not.

Their only critical Terms of Service are reporting well-written tech journalism
in real time, and making sure you don't post offensive nonsense.

Not enough

If you can apply a mathematical formula, even with random numbers and even random functions, there will be a way to unravel it. It might take a ton of work, but if you can get all the encoded data, it will eventually be cracked. To advertise it as a perfect privacy solution, preys on the majority of people who have woeful mathematical skills.

[unknown unknown]

Reply

I think you may has misunderstood. The system IBM developed still allows to get statistics about their general user population but the randomizing prevents them from getting information about a specific user. If I give you my age plus a random number it would be very hard to get my age out of it, and know that you're correct without asking me. When you consider the number of entires in these databases it becomes quite impractical to even try.