Global Finance article looks to the future

It’s not a bad start to the new year (and decade) when a journal like Global Finance sees value in the work you’re doing. Their cover story on “A Wide Open World” just hit the stands and I’m pleased that some of my contributions made their way into the article. Specifically:

The ISOC’s Adams believes access to information will be a key driver of change. “Whereas today users generally manage data within the silo of single institutions—for example, individual bank, brokerage, or credit card companies—new capabilities will allow them to delegate access to and control authority over their data as it is shared across institutions,” he says.

While it wasn’t mentioned by name, I was referencing work being done by Eve Maler, Iain Henderson, Joe Andrieu and others in various Kantara Initiative working groups. Specifically in the User-Managed Access (UMA) and Information-Sharing groups. Too bad they weren’t included by name, but I hope this helps give them the recognition they (and their long list of collaborators) deserve.

They also reference my comments about “open trust frameworks” and the Kantara Identity Assurance Program, but reduced it to generalities. There’re a lot of amazingly dedicated folks working hard on open specifications in this area to help standardize a trusted model for information exchange. Even though they’re not named, this is a great example of their work starting to permeate the broader market.

Great job, folks. Keep it up!

(PS Many thanks to Greg and the ISOC communications team for facilitating my contribution to the article.)

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January 6th, 2010 | Pointers | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Not Entirely Anonymous

For anyone interested in privacy, I highly recommend reading “De-anonymizing Social Networks” by Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov.

Here’s a snippet from the introduction:

We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate.

So, basically, what they’ve done is effectively identify matching Twitter and Flickr accounts. Abstracted, though, their algorithm points out that all they need to map the relationships is an undirected data graph (with indications a directed graph would improve the effectiveness). Graphs like this can be found everywhere, and is what drives the behavioral targeting industry.

With this algorithm running around now, I guess data brokers will have to work a bit harder to anonymize your data. Perhaps they’ll pinch some ideas from Alex Ntoulas at Microsoft and start injecting noise into your systems.

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April 7th, 2009 | Pointers | , | Leave a comment