By Patrick Tucker, Technology Review
As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility. Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. In 1995, the European Union introduced privacy legislation that defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. The legislators were apparently thinking of things like documents with an identification number, and they wanted them protected just as if they carried your name. Today, that definition encompasses far more information than those European legislators could ever have imagined—easily more than all the bits and bytes in the entire world when they wrote their law 18 years ago.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514351/has-big-data-made-anonymity-impossible/
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