One of the aspects of AI is the whole privacy thing.

We are unwittingly giving away a lot of highly valued data to those who would want to sway our opinion, be that advertisers or political parties.

However, if we wittingly do so, by accepting that the data collected will be anonymised, we are looking at the problem from a very narrow perspective based on our perception of anonymity.

Our names may not be present, but there are other data points that uniquely identify us. Most would be able to guess a friend’s identity if you knew the gender, birthday, and what sort of car they drove.

Our limits to this approach are bounded by our brain’s capacity to hold all these things in memory for all of our friends, and the number of friends that we have.

But, computing power knows no such boundaries and can link databases to “guess” individuals associated with such data.

Have a go at https://cpg.doc.ic.ac.uk/individual-risk/

Do the test, using fictional data and see how easy it is for a machine to work out who you are