"Denoising" algorithms can't remove this kind of noise. It doesn't work like that. You're simply mistaken.

Generally the state of the art for adding noise to data is differential privacy or microaggregation. In the case of differential privacy it's typically gaussian or laplacian noise, but it is not a trivial application. Noise applied through microaggregation is not a mathematical function because microaggregation targets k in k-anonymity, and the "noise" can only be measured after treatment, through various distortion measures.

My company doesn't sell private data or facilitate the sale of private data. We improve privacy within organizations to reduce the risk of privacy leaks. Data brokers and ad targeters would have no interest in our software. But thanks for the condescending comment!

Who do you think "data brokers and ad targets" purchase data from?

I don't understand how you could help companies protect the private data they collect from users and think that you're not facilitating the collection and sale of it.

Almost literally every company with human customers collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business. Very few of those have a business model where the purpose is to profit from the sale of that data. Every one of our customers is treating first party data for first party use cases, which is far more common than buying or selling data. How many companies have prod user data and developers that need an up to date prod-like database? A ton. Many just copy prod and distribute to devs. The good ones try to keep scripts for populating the database with test data up to date, but that’s a nightmare. Anonymization is an elegant solution to this problem. There are countless other use cases where organizations need to use their customer data internally and (should) want to protect identities.

Most companies don’t want to sell their user data because they consider it competitive, and most data brokers don’t want to anonymize because why would they if they’re already selling raw data? They aren’t interested in our software because we prevent singling out of identities.

> collects user data because it’s necessary to run a business

That's a lie we developers like to tell ourselves. But the reality is that most companies track data because some sold them software to track data.

It's ridiculous how every single small business website has cookie banners, GDPR consent, and includes multiple tracking scripts on their website to collect all the user data they can get their hands on.

Yet these small businesses have no idea what data they are collecting. The owners are completely clueless. They have all this data collection shit on their website because someone else who has no clue put it there.

They see facebook and google collecting all this data, and think they need to collect data too. But they have no idea what to do with it. At best they look at a few numbers and get a feeling that all the money they spent on their website was worth it.

But it's all bullshit. 90% of businesses don't need invasive tracking, don't know what to do with the collected data, and could save money if they didn't bother to track all that useless data.

If you have a name, address, and phone number associated with a customer account, then you have collected PII. Good luck avoiding that.

User tracking actually requires linking to associate online activities with user personas. Anonymization systems are designed to break linking.

From sources that don't use differential privacy to mask the relevant features.

Can you maybe share your mathematical opposition to differential privacy? It's provably effectively.

> they're always proven incorrect

This is pretty obvious survivorship bias. You think that they’re wrong because you only hear about the cases when they were. There are tons of examples of breaches where the anonymization held up, it’s just that it’s not interesting so nobody talks about it.

Umm, yes?

If I have a lock on my door that successfully prevented 99 people from breaking in, but one skilled lockpicker subverted it, then my lock has failed.

That’s the wrong analogy. If 99% of locks are resistant to picking but yours wasn’t, it’s ridiculous to then say that locks don’t work.

The analogy isn't that one out of a hundred locks don't work, but the none of the locks work in the face of a skilled attacker that may comprise 1% of the attackers.

This isn't saying that locks are worthless, but it is saying that thinking of them as secure is a false confidence. This sort of truth is why there's a saying in the security field that you're at the greatest risk the moment that you think you're secure.

In terms of data security, the only way to be actually secure from data leakage is to not be in possession of the data.

That’s simply incorrect.

Edit: my source for this is that I have been involved with hundreds of data breaches where the EU was satisfied that the privacy controls were sufficient to say that no personal data was compromised.

What part of what I said was incorrect?

Your source doesn't make the case that I was incorrect about any of my assertions. That doesn't mean I'm right, of course, but I don't see how examples of privacy controls successfully protecting data disproves them. There can still be cases where the controls failed.

> What part of what I said was incorrect?

All parts of it. You are asserting that a sufficiently skilled attacker can magically overcome all privacy controls. This fundamentally misunderstands how privacy controls work. Don’t make absolute statements, they’re always incorrect (see what I did there?).

When data is compliantly anonymized, the ability to deanonymize it has been irrevocably destroyed. When evaluating privacy controls, you evaluate them against a trusted insider with full access and unlimited time. There are lots of organizations whose controls meet this bar.

And yet we all still use door locks, despite the fact that a skilled lock picker could break every standard door lock in minutes. This illustrates the importance of threat modeling.

> Just come to grips with the fact you're participating in the sale of my (or whoever's) private data. Hope you sleep well!

I think it's really sad that the open source community has historically cultivated a culture which doesn't recognize this kind of paranoia as a lack of mental wellness. I think it's because the zealotry comports well with the extreme amount of energy needed to bootstrap the ecosystem into existence.

You can care about privacy while being unrealistic about why you don't truly have it and never will, because of how much of a risk it is to the powers that be. You can live in a world ruled by proxy wars between gigantic political superpowers and empires who control the upstream levers of the macroeconomy to ensure that the world will always go in a direction opposite to what you'd prefer it to be. It's been like this for thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

But moreover, you can and likely do live in a society, full of people who will always value convenience over the freedom you seem to cherish. But even you likely are willing to give up some freedom and privacy for some convenience, unless you employ private security personnel to guard your private compound. And my guess is that if you were inclined in that direction, you wouldn't really be posting on HN. Short of that, to live in a modern society is to some degree accept this compromise and to accept one's own hypocrisy -- and my heart goes out to you as much as to myself because the existential anguish of this never goes away. Nonetheless, it is generally historically accepted that as we grow older, we are to develop the ability to constructively manage around this and gain the wisdom to do so.

Perhaps the reason you sarcastically asked GP that you "hope you sleep well" is because you are projecting and you know that you yourself do not. My advice to you and those of your ilk: stop obsessing over theoeretical purity and get on with enjoying your life in the scarce time you have left on this planet. You'll have far less regrets at the end. And you will finally sleep well.

I'd rather work on building alternatives that respect their users than pay corporations to abuse me, thanks.

I see such attempts as well-intentioned, and while benign, ultimately ineffective. Unless you find a way to make the right way the convenient way, social convergence will be a wind always pushing against you rather than at your back.

>Just come to grips with the fact you're participating in the sale of my (or whoever's) private data. Hope you sleep well!

What an uncharitable response in that it forecloses on the original commentator even explaining their argument better or clarifying. I mean what? Fuck a bit more honest debate and just jump to pre-assumed moral judgement?