Credit card bills make you easy to identify

摘要

Drop the disguise: your metadata still gives you away. Four hints is all it takes to match almost anyone to their supposedly anonymised credit card records. The findings suggest that tougher measures must be put in place to protect users' privacy. Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his team looked at credit card records over a three-month period from 1.1 million people in an unidentified country. Personal information like names and account numbers had been deleted but the dates and locations of transactions were intact.