Online anonymity is a lie: Research challenges privacy protection frameworks

Online privacy and anonymity seem farther away from our reach than ever. It is almost as if every new advancement and progress in technology further removes another brick from an already flimsy wall of privacy on the web. Although legislations such as GDPR were designed to protect user privacy and anonymity, these guarantees hold little weight against powerful technologies like machine learning which -- researchers have found -- can piece together anonymized information to form your complete identity. The research, recently published in Nature Communications, has demonstrated that it is possible to reconstruct the real identities of individuals from sampled… [Continue Reading]