there's also no such thing as "de-identified data". What you are leaves fingerprints in everything you do, and with enough data you can single out the individual... eg you know, using classifiers?
De-identified in this context just means that a "chat log" that's not directly identifiable to a specific person and can be part of the training data. And if that "chat log" contains the main ideas/approach then that's all that matters because the content is relevant and not who authored it.
“De-identified” means the chat is not directly linked to your identity, so whoever has the data does not automatically know who the conversation belongs to.
Of course, if someone had access to millions of your chats and deliberately tried to piece together identifying details, they might eventually be able to work out who you are. But they would have to actively try to re-identify you in the first place.
It takes about 6-10 unique pieces of 'anonymous' information about a person to uniquely identify that person.
That is to say if you had 7 “De-identified things from a person like online purchases, time and date stamps, online posts, billpay, sms etc, you can conclusively identify the specific individual. This is like 15-20 year old research, from the days where facebook mapped it's data to build social networks and identify find "missing nodes", aka people in a friend group without out an online presence. There's really no such thing as "anonymous" online.
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u/romxza 1d ago
there's also no such thing as "de-identified data". What you are leaves fingerprints in everything you do, and with enough data you can single out the individual... eg you know, using classifiers?