Anonymized medical records can be re-identified using public voter lists

Evidence

In 1997 data privacy researcher Latanya Sweeney famously demonstrated that using publicly available population registers (e.g., a voter list), she could identify the medical records of Massachusetts Governor William Weld from medical information that had already been stripped of all explicit identifiers, such as name, address, and Social Security number. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2298

Categorization

• CANDY: A crisp, nameable anecdote: one researcher unmasked the governor’s medical records using just a voter list — great dinner-party fact.
• XREF: Connects to the de-anonymization literature and to the broader theme that ‘anonymization’ is a broken promise — echoes work by Ohm referenced just after. — connects to: Large-scale health-data aggregation can escape existing legal medical protections — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 529; Supposedly anonymized location data can identify individuals’ home addresses — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 543; Anonymous meta-data can be reliably de-anonymized with only three public data points — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 765 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Public majorities consistently favor stronger privacy protections in surveys #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1074