Comment Doesn't really protect privacy cross-site (Score 1) 224
Adding noise does an OK job of protecting an individual response, but after years of submitting survey responses to many web surveys, there'd be plenty of data to make excellent estimates of your personal attributes.
How many users are aware that many of the sites they visit pool data?
There's an enormous body of research on how to hide individual records in databases, ranging from adding noise to preventing queries that access fewer than a set number of records. In the end, none of the methods work well - all have simple or clever workarounds. Even individual records aren't very well protected by adding noise if the record size is large enough and fields are dependent.
How many users are aware that many of the sites they visit pool data?
There's an enormous body of research on how to hide individual records in databases, ranging from adding noise to preventing queries that access fewer than a set number of records. In the end, none of the methods work well - all have simple or clever workarounds. Even individual records aren't very well protected by adding noise if the record size is large enough and fields are dependent.
