Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles

Re:Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality th... by mikk14 on Monday April 17, 2017 @12:03PM (#14131917)

There is a seminal paper showing how carelessly adopting this point of view can lead to disasters: "87% of the U.S. population is uniquely identified by date of birth, gender, postal code" [1]

In many other cases, as pointed out, it's just not possible. I'm studying mobility patterns through cellphone metadata. Even if you strip out the actual phone number with a random ID you still know where a person is going, and thus re-identify them if you have other public data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latanya_Sweeney

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality th... by user5994461 on Monday April 17, 2017 @02:57PM (#14133453)

full name + date of birth + place of birth.

That leaves about 500 non unique individuals in a country of > 50 million inhabitants.

[ Parent | on HN ]