managing and protecting nyms...

[Sarad AV]

I thought you needed to de-correlate the anonymous data sets. Say that the
database entries of a medical record are nym, age, location, type_of_disease.
For e.g. Mickey, 43, Madison area, chance_for_don't_insure_him_disease. Now,
it doesn't matter they may not find your actual name or address-they can
correlate across databases to put up a red flag when someone matching the
remaining fields except for the first one(nym)requests a health insurance
policy.
Note: The nym can be anything-in the above case it is just a nickname.

Sarad.


--- On Fri, 11/6/09, Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net> wrote:

> From: Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>
> Subject: Re: managing and protecting nyms...
> To: "John Case" <case at sdf.lonestar.org>
> Cc: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
> Date: Friday, November 6, 2009, 6:45 AM
> On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 23:05 +0000,
> John Case wrote:
> > I should have asked this years ago when there was more
> traffic/users on
> > this list (and I was using a different nym[1]) ... but
> years ago there was
> > not such established proof of data correlation in
> "anonymized" data sets
> > (netflix, "anonymized" medical data, etc.)
> [...]
> > These actions are probably not robust.  My
> thought is that it can lower my
> > common profiles below the noise threshold that a
> particular aggregator
> > might have.
> >
> > What do _you_ do to sanitize/de-correlate your nyms ?
>
> I don't. I only use a nym for things that need to appear to
> have been
> done by a third party, or for other reasons should not be
> traceable back
> to Shawn K. Quinn.
>
> Someone who I am currently not on speaking terms with once
> "clarified"
> his/her position by stating her online and in-person
> personas were
> different; his/her online persona made it appear he/she was
> more
> approachable than he/she actually was. I simply don't play
> that game.
>
> I do follow cypherpunk topics, I use PGP/GnuPG, Tor,
> Mixmaster, Freenet,
> GNUnet, etc. from time to time, but for the most part, I'm
> not nearly as
> paranoid as I used to be. For better or for worse. Hell, I
> quit
> channeling my Google queries through Tor some time ago (I
> still only
> accept session cookies from Google, and that's only to make
> the services
> work that require a Google account).
>
> --
> Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>