Author: Michael Barbaro, Tom Zeller Jr.
Publisher: The New York Times
Publication Year: 2006
Summary: The following article discusses how in 2006, AOL purposefully released 20 million anonymized search queries that had been made over a 3-month span. The company removed personally identifiable information (PII), but assigned a unique user-ID to the queries. It took researchers at the New York Times mere days to personally identify a randomly selected user (No. 4417749), Thelma Arnold. Big data exposes us to entirely new risks. Companies, researchers, and governments no longer need PII to determine who we are.
