Comment Re: Data Security Officer (Score 1) 192
Throughout this conversation, I've been patiently waiting for someone to realize there's a lot more correlating data available in plain sight than anyone is owning up to. Provided that realization is made in the first place, the ensuing thought experiment should rapidly progress through probability, curve fitting, and rote process of elimination in a key space drastically reduced from even the space represented by the raw medallion search space.
If someone else, anyone else, would bother to think about this for a few moments, they might just arrive at a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: some data sets cannot be properly anonymised at all. Put another way, engineering a cryptographic solution in a vacuum is a lot like gasping for breath in outer space: you can perform actions you are utterly convinced are perfectly valid, but owing to context the end result is going to be highly unpleasant.
This is why we can't have nice things, specifically things involving sane public policy regarding privacy. Regardless of how the voting populace and their elected representatives might desire to craft policy in one direction or another, fundamental lack of understanding of the underlying environment and its rules of operation implies a necessary disconnect between intent and outcome.
This is why people need to study formal reference materials and think about things before they make recommendations, and it is why large scale intelligence outfits will continue to trump those under observation. Tunnel vision is a motherfucker.