How easily can you be identified on the Internet?

How easily can you be identified on the Internet?

Suppose you finish your meal at a restaurant, you are about to pay the check, and the manager asks, “Would you like a free dessert on your next birthday? Just fill out the bottom of the check with your date of birth, your email address and your zip code, and we’ll send you an email with a coupon just before your birthday.”

That sounds OK, but you ask, “You mean just the month and day, right?”

The manager replies, “No, we need the year too because we will send you other coupons that are age-appropriate. The zip code is just so we know how far our customers traveled.”

That sounds reasonable, but you are still a little skeptical. “Are you going to sell your mailing list to others with my name and home address?”

The manager replies, “We don’t need your name or your home address for this.” So you fill out the bottom of the check. Still skeptical, you pay with cash so the restaurant has no record of your name.

And of course, several months later you receive a coupon by snail mail at your home address, correctly addressed to you by name and home address.

Suppose you google your own name. I googled mine. Eliminating people with the same name who are not me, I found references to me at a number of free sites that state at least two of my age, mailing address, phone numbers, and family members.

Some of these have my correct birth date and some do not. Most of these have my correct age. Mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and family members may or may not be accurate, or current.

Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney, currently a dean at Harvard, is credited with a commonly quoted statement that 87% of the US population is uniquely identifiable from just 5-digit zip code, gender, and date of birth, (Sweeney, 2000.) She used many publicly available data sources in her research including voter registration lists.

Sweeney provides this quick calculation: 365 days in a year x 100 years x 2 genders = 73,000 unique permutations. (About My Info, 2013.) But many 5-digit zip codes are not that large. My zip code from my youth in New York City has a population of about 67,000. My current zip code is about 31,000. Sweeney’s work estimates that in my current 5-digit zip code, combined with some census data on total number of people with my age and gender, there is likely to be only one person in my zip code with my gender and date of birth.

So when that restaurant sells its customer database to some third party for a completely different use, that third party can probably identify me by name, even though I never gave my name or address to the restaurant. And that was the time I ordered the burger AND the fries.

About My Info. (2013.) How unique am I? Retrieved from https://aboutmyinfo.org/identity/about

Sweeney, L. (2000.) Simple demographics often identify people uniquely. Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3. Pittsburgh. Retrieved from https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pdf