• Harvard Business Review, Monday, February 9, 2015 2:47 PM

Anonymous data doesn't exist. I've been writing about this for years. Now MIT scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye has published a paper showing how anonymous credit card data can be reverse engineered to identify individuals' transactions. The article does not provide details about online data, but those who are Internet savvy can do the same with online data collected from Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter and other sites and companies. About 90% of the time, De Montjoye identified individuals in the dataset using the date and location of just four of their transactions. Scott Berinato explains.

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