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Randomisation for Web Privacy IBM's Next Gen Data Mining | |
Randomisation for Web Privacy
The two biggest names in Data Mining, Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant, researchers at IBM, think they have come up with a solution for user privacy on the internet -- according to this article on The Register: IBM's Answer to Web Privacy. The trick is to add random values to the user's data when he submits it via a form. A data-mining algorithm, presumably tailored to deal with statistical analysis is then applied to retrieve accurate trends in the falsified data. I have three issues with this technology... first, you need a lot of users to be able to get reasonable patterns when constant noise is applied. Secondly, shouldn't web privacy aim to allow the user not to enter his information at all; if not, why can't exact information be stored confidentially on a server, using a standard data-mining algorithm to extract trends? Thirdly, what stops a user from entering false data altogether! (a point raised in the article) Hmmm... |
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