Posted by Michael Wonder on 05 Dec 2016
Can the government really protect your privacy when it 'de-identifies' public data?
5 December 2016 - We don't yet know to how to use big data and protect privacy at the same time.
In 1897, the Indiana legislature considered a bill for "introducing a new mathematical truth", a clever procedure for "squaring the circle". The procedure didn't work; for one thing, it assumed that the value of pi was 3.2 (it isn't). The bill didn't pass but, if it had, it wouldn't have changed the value of pi – it just would have made the Indiana legislature look a bit silly. Parliaments can change a lot of things, but not the laws of mathematics.
The Australian Parliament is now considering amending the Privacy Act. Attorney-General George Brandis introduced the amendments, saying "there is a strict and standard government procedure to de-identify all government data that is published. Data that is released is anonymised so that the individuals who are the subject of that data cannot be identified." But the bill specifies a two-year jail term for re-identifying people from those data sets. Usually, acts that are impossible don't need to be banned.
