In this article, it was been reported that computer scientists were able to de-anonymize supposedly anonymous data and re-identify individuals. This, however, is not entirely new. De-anonymisation has been conducted successfully in 2006 when AOL released the search logs of over a half million of their users (here) and in 2009 by researchers in social networks (here). Stripping personal identifiable information such as usernames from data sets is an insufficient step in the anonymizing process.
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