EU Official: IP Is Personal

Joel Jaeggli joelja at bogus.com
Thu Jan 24 23:10:13 UTC 2008


Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
> I'm sorry, but, I have a great deal of difficulty seeing how an IP can
> be considered
> personally identifying.

In the case the german regulator is dealing with the ip address is not
be considered exclusive of the rest of a data set. The question is given
 a commercially valuable dataset which contains ip addresses what is
sufficient to anonymize the users while maintaining the value of the
data. The regulator has one view, which is probably wrong and search
engine company (google is the one that is quoted) has another which is
also probably wrong.

Can someone able to mine search engine log data pick out individual
users? Yes it's been demonstrated several times. Can you pick
individuals out of "anonymized" datasets? Yes to that too. Can an IP
address in exclusion to anything else be used to pick out an individual?
possibly under some circumstances, but definitely not with a high degree
of certainty.

> For example, in my home, I have static addresses.  However, the number of
> different people using those addresses would, to me, imply that you cannot
> personally identify anyone based solely on the IP address they are using
> within my network.  Certainly, you cannot say that I initiated all of
> the packets
> which came from my addresses.
> 
> Another example would be a retail store that I work with as a SCUBA
> Instructor.
> They also have static IP addresses, but, I would not say that any of the
> traffic
> coming from the store is necessarily personally identifiable.  Our entire
> staff (half a dozen instructors, a dozen or so divemasters and AIs, the
> owner, and at least one other retail assistant) source traffic from within
> that network.
> 
> The larger the business, the less identifiable the addresses become,
> generally.
> However, even in these ultra-small examples, I don't feel that the
> addresses
> are, in themselves, personally identifying.
> 
> Owen
> 




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