Just 4 Credit Card Clues Can Identify Anyone

Just Four Credit Card Clues Can Identify Anyone

United Nations University | January 29, 2015

Four pieces of information is all that's needed to match individuals to their anonymised credit card records, according to researchers from MIT. The findings suggest that tougher measures must be put in place to protect users' privacy, because real identities may be too tied in to the rich metadata, such as GPS coordinates, collected by modern devices.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20150209035021khur.nb/topstory.html

<more at http://www.merit.unu.edu/itweekly/html.php?nid=5333; https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26879-just-four-credit-card-clues-can-identify-anyone/ (Just four credit card clues can identify anyone. January 29, 2015) and http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/536.figures-only (Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata. Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye1, Laura Radaelli, Vivek Kumar Singh, and Alex “Sandy” Pentland. Science 30 January 2015: Vol. 347 no. 6221 pp. 536-539 DOI: 10.1126/science.1256297.)>