Minimal factor identification

How many of the "general" type personal details would someone need to be able to find you using a database of all such information? Things like: 

  • Hometown 
  • Gender 
  • College attended
  • Age bracket 

As opposed to more specific things like high school attended (vs. hometown, though that might not matter in places where privates schools are non-existent) or major/degree granted vs. university attended. Some people like to believe they are almost anonymous and others are (in their minds, for sure) the epitome of unique snowflake. But as a thought experiment, how many general or specific things would be needed to find you? Using myself as an example, I feel pretty confident (~75% probability) that a motivated person could identify me using just: 

  • My hometown (suburb of a major US city) 
  • Gender 
  • University attended (gigantic state public university but one I attended as an out-of-state student)
  • Approximate age (maybe a +/- 2 years around my true age) 

If you add in just one specific piece of data - say, my major - I believe you could get to 99%. I am not as confident of this method if I had to gone to my in-state flagship university but I still think it would work.

What feels very strange is that despite this reality, many of us feel very commodified in the sense that "well, I'm just one guy with a _____ degree out of 100,000+ in the US alone." I wonder if that essential fact of modern society contributes to people's odd sense of ego/self in modern society. 

So how many general and specific pieces of data do you think someone would need to identify you given what you know about yourself? What are some other general & specific identifiers?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can't Work? No Healthcare

It's time that the United States - and the MAGA party in particular - own its policy that if you don't work, you don't deserve healthcare. I was listening to NPR (I know, I know...) and there was a story about the ACA premiums exploding with the expiration of subsidies. They interviewed a doddering retiree (on Medicare, naturally) and it really should be quoted in full here: QUIRMBACH: Here, extending help for ACA enrollees does not have a lot of support. Stepping away from the game, Rita Schulte, a retiree who's on Medicare, the federal health program that covers most seniors, says the Obamacare enhanced subsidies should only be extended a short time, if at all. Schulte says for people who aren't retired like her, she wants bigger changes in the Affordable Care Act that lower costs for taxpayers. RITA SCHULTE: If they'd ever get it overhauled, maybe we wouldn't need all this extra help from the government because you can't rely on the governmen...
Read more

ICE & Theories for the Midterms

Image
Theory: ICE on the ground in cities is meant to accustom (and build an “excuse” – such as it is) for the public so when the midterms come around, the paramilitary thugs on the street are already in place to help out with voter intimidation. Who in their right mind will risk going out to vote unless they look like they are of northern European extraction? My unfinished idea today is that the reason that Seattle hasn’t been targeted much harder for ICE raids is that Washington has mail in voting. As in, the entire state votes by mail and there is really no opportunity in the state to vote in person even if you wanted to. Thus, there isn’t any real “efficiency” to wasting your agents intimidating a population that, due to logistical reasons, it doesn’t really make much sense to bother with. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze to use a modern idiom. ICE raids could be happening in rural areas, where a LOT of illegal immigrants are working in industri...
Read more

What Comes Next?

This should be a theme of discussion - Trump has largely destroyed the old order of the past 75 years. The old-school liberals might continue to fight some kind of rear-guard action to protect the institutions and processes but the foundational trust has been shattered and will take a generation at a minimum of careful rebuilding. The centrist liberals need to seize this opportunity to decide what gets built on the ashes in the United States. And there is a very real likelihood they will not even get to CHOOSE, they will have a selection of bad to worse choices placed in front of them... - International military position of the US: NATO, our Asian allies (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), Israel, the Middle East. Do we want to espouse our "values"? Realpolitik? Isolationism? What does the world look like if the US simply withdraws? Can it? Does the world WANT us to? - Finance/Trade: free movement of labor to match free movemen...
Read more