Analysis of Risks to Data Privacy Throughout European Countries

摘要

Fears of having personal information discovered by malicious or even benign actors on the Internet has raised substantial concerns about the sensitivity of personal information. Perhaps the first and very surprising research on this was published a number of years ago by LaTanya Sweeney. She was able to show that approximately 87% of persons in the United States could be uniquely identified through the discovery of a triad of data points T = (PC, G, B) where PC = the United States' five digit postal code; G = gender; and B = birth date (including year). Her results, first published in 2000, have been stable since that time. Sweeney only considered the data applicable to the United States. In this work, we have used an approach similar to Sweeney's, but we are able to estimate the challenge to data privacy for all 51 European countries, including both European Community and non-European Community countries, as well as several counties only partially in Europe.