However, with as little as three bits of data easily culled from the public record—birth date, zip code, and sex—reidentification science has demonstrated its ability to de-anonymize meta-data with “disturbing ease.” In a summary of this research, legal scholar Paul Ohm writes that “re-identification makes all our secrets fundamentally easier to discover and reveal. Our enemies will find it easier to connect us to facts that they can use to blackmail, harass, defame, frame or discriminate against us.… This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law.” Regarding the massive caches of supposedly anonymous behavior surplus, Ohm calls them “databases of ruin.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 765