Herd Privacy

Ful Title or Meme

A wide range of anonymization techniques have been proposed that give the illusion of Privacy.

Context

• Most of the "anonymization" techniques depend on removing all Personally Identifiable Information from the document for from a data base. The fact that this is pure fiction has not stoped the spread of this idea.
• The US Census anonymized census data to provide privacy.
• Bitcoin explicitly claimed it remained completely anonymous even though every participate has a public key which acts just like an Identifier.
• THe W3C Credential Community Group claimed Herd Privacy by virtue of the large number of identifiers flooding around.

Problems

One very good repudiation of this stated the following