The Shadows We Leave Behind: On the Anonymous Sharing of Human Traces
The Illusion of the Individual Secret
There is a widespread and perhaps comforting misunderstanding among the general public that privacy is a solid wall, a sturdy fortress built securely around the self. In reality, privacy in our current digital age is much more like a thin, fragile veil, easily pierced by those who possess the right computational tools and enough patience. When a large hospital shares a medical dataset with a university, they genuinely believe they are protecting the patient by simply removing their name and personal identity number from the files. (more…)