RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Games and Tech Hacking Netflix and Identity Theft

Where Everybody Knows Your Name: What do AOL customers, Netflix subscribers, and abortion seekers in Oklahoma have in common? Hacking their identities is a cinch.

• This fall, Paul Ohm of the University of Colorado Law School published a study on the "surprising failure of anonymization." He writes that we have "labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention."
  
  As Ohm notes, while the tech community has become very aware of the privacy issues surrounding large data sets over the last several years—Google has fought off broad government subpoenas demanding search queries, even though the feds weren't asking for personal information about users—Oklahoma state legislators don't seem to have gotten the memo. And it's safe to assume that federal legislators will suffer from the same problem. For now, the Oklahoma rules are on hold while a court considers a challenge to the law. The hearing was postponed this week, after a second judge recused herself from the case. But this won't be the last time courts have to consider the viability of laws like Oklahoma's. And as the federal government gets more involved with health care, the feds will be looking for ways to get more bang for their regualtory buck. One of the likely results: More disclosure mandates, so that we can all be part of the great, ongoing statistics project whether we like it or not.
  
  There's an old(ish) adage that the Internet treats censorship as a malfunction, and routes around it. There's a corollary for online data, voiced by Sweeney, now of Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society, who has said that “data tend to flow around and get linked to other data.” Stripping out information about names and addresses isn't enough to keep data secure. Digital data sets don't stay isolated. And as Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: "Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both."

Christopher Robin pinned my tail back on.. and it hurt.. but i am sort of attached to it.. sigh

Fuck off, you pathetic moron.