Covert channels
December 19th, 2007
Nice summary blog post by Schneier on covert channels and anonymity. The problem has been around in intelligence community for quite some time (remember the urban legend about increased pizza sale on the eve of the Desert Storm?). There are two additions to the problem today (some 16 years later) – there is more electronic information about us out there and more computer power to crunch the seemingly meaningless data.
In short, two guys at the University of Texas at Austin used publicly available Netflix database of customers’ (‘annonimous’) movie rankings and matched it with IMDB’s public web based records to de-anonymize customers and create their ‘movie’ profiles. Not extremely useful results in terms of people’s profiles, but an interesting proof of concept.
An earlier research proved that ”87 percent of the population in the United States, 216 million of 248 million, could likely be uniquely identified by their five-digit ZIP code, combined with their gender and date of birth.”
Pretty scary.
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July 9th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
[...] is nothing new. I already blogged about covert channels and how publicly available data can be used to acurately guess personal [...]