Well, this is encouraging. It turns out that just four pieces of information are required to identify individuals in 90% of cases: the dates and locations of four purchases. That’s true in datasets that don’t include what we think of as “personally identifiable information”, i.e. names, addresses, telephone numbers, credit card numbers.
European laws are much stricter about the information governments are allowed to possess and the information companies are allowed to retain. Land of the free, indeed.
