So this is a little different from the usual fare here, but my colleague Tom Lee at the Sunlight Foundation has been thinking about using basic cryptographic concepts to convince governments to publish more unique identifiers in their datasets -- even when the identifiers they have in their *databases* is sensitive (like SSNs). The problem of anonymizing unique data is in some senses easier than others here, because in some gov't contexts, making things personally identifiable isn't the problem -- the *intent* is to publish personally identifiable, connect-able information, like for campaign donors and lobbyists. So the Mosaic Effect (de-anonymizing Netflix data) is less of a concern. Depends on the problem, though. After talking about it on a couplehttps://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sunlightlabs/CdCdB_0TCgcof listshttps://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2014-February/012834.h..., Tom blogged it up: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/03/20/a-little-math-could-make-ident... Your feedback would be very welcome, either here or in public fora. Of course, convincing government agencies to actually do this sort of thing might be a challenge, but there's a lot of levels and branches of government out there - you never know who might lead the way. -- Eric -- konklone.com | @konklone https://twitter.com/konklone