The nonfree “education” app Along, developed by a company controlled by Zuckerberg, encourages students to use it for private conversations with their teachers. Some of the personal data it collects is very sensitive. The company grants itself the power to sell “anonymized” data from which, in spite of “anonymization,” it will be possible to identify many of the students, perhaps most. In fact, research shows that in most cases anonymization can be easily undone and data tracked back to identify individuals uniquely.
“Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacyprotecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques that protect the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated that they can often ‘reidentify’ or ‘deanonymize’ individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease.” —From Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, by Prof. Paul Ohm. UCLA Law Review, 2010. 57, 1701-1777.
Ohm’s paper provides examples of how computer scientists were able to identify people from supposedly anonymized databases, while suggesting that the existing privacy legislation
— source gnu.org