A while ago, Alex Dimakis sent me an EFF article on information theory and privacy, which starts out with an observation of Latanya Sweeney’s that gender, ZIP code, birthdate are uniquely identifying for a large portion of the population (an updated observation was made in 2006).

What’s weird is that the article veers into “how many bits of do you need to uniquely identify someone” based on self-information or surprisal calculations. It paints a bit of a misleading picture about how to answer the question. I’d probably start with taking and then look at the variables in question.

However, the mere existence of this article raises a point : here is a situation where ideas from information theory and probability/statistics can be made relevant to a larger population. It’s a great opportunity to popularize our field (and demonstrate good ways of thinking about it). Why not do it ourselves?