Daniel Barth-Jones, an HIV and infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University, writes for FierceBigData about the importance of accurate de-identification methods in response to the paper Privacy, Anonymity and Big Data in the Social Sciences from MITx and HarvardX MOOC scholars Jon Daries, Justin Reich and others. Barth-Jones writes that the view that “anonymization  is an obsolete tactic made increasingly difficult by advances in data mining and big data" is short-sighted, noting, “de-identification should rather be appropriately taken as part of an integrated and multidimensional approach for fashioning effective public policy for big data privacy.”
Full Story