Re:Yahoo Releases the Largest-Ever Machine Learning Dataset ...
by joatmon-snoo on Friday January 15, 2016 @01:59AM
(#10907702)
The thing that terrifies me specifically is that there's been work done - I believe it was a branch of the US military studying network traffic patterns - showing that you can reconstruct profiles based on behavior patterns and link them back to the original user with high success rates.
Once data like this is deanonymized, it's out there forever -- there's no going back to fix it like you would a software bug. So you need perfect understanding and provable security at release time to guaranteed safety into the indefinite future. That's not an easy constraint to satisfy.