On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 02:23:09PM +0200, Louigi Verona wrote: > I am working in the adtech industry and can say as a fact that all data is > anonymous. Anonymity is very seriously enforced throughout the industry > and, additionally, lack of such anonymity will be seen very quickly by huge > amounts of engineers working with user databases. The advertising industry doesn't just want to know that there are 100.000 people interested in some product, and which traits these people have in common. They want to serve each of them targeted ads. You are are right that for that they don't need to identify people by name, but that's besides the point. Privacy is much more than not being identified. It also means that others are not able to exploit knowledge about you that has not been given explicitly for some particular purpose. Practice shows (in particular in the US) that when the possibility to exploit such knowledge exists, it will be used. Today you can be refused a job because Amazon and/or Google know what you are reading and has sold this info to some employment screening agency. Apart from that, it's quite easy to identify people by combining 'anonynous' data. See some of the references below. <http://techscience.org/a/2015103001/download.pdf> <http://www.pnas.org/content/113/20/5536.full.pdf> <http://www.autosec.org/pubs/fingerprint.pdf> <https://www.schneier.com/books/data_and_goliath/> <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/05/google_moving_f.html> Bruce Schneier is regarded as one of the most authoritative experts on security and privacy related matters. All the links above are from his blog. You can question my or other poster's knowledge, but probbaly not his. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow) _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
