90% of “Anonymous” Data Isn’t!

So, it’s the big question we have all been waiting for. When you give to a charity or take a survey and you choose anonymous, are you really anonymous?

The answer is no.

Big data sets that are often made publicly available to anyone who wants to analyze it are supposed to be anonymous.

The idea is to leave out key pieces of information about the people involved, such as name or home address, and leave only the larger trends.

However, the study published in the journal Science posits that researchers were able to identify “anonymous” shoppers from a big-data set based on credit card metadata!