It's no secret that anonomizing data doesn't always work well. We have heard about this when Netflix released their data for people to build algorithms with. Some people were identified based on the data released being correlated with other data the people had entered on the Internet themselves. I know that there are dangers with sharing too much information on the Internet, but people are going to share and there will only be more services in the future for us to use that require data.

I ran across a post recently from Microsoft researchers that showed similar issues with other anonymous data sets that contain IP information. A number of logs containing traffic from Bing and Hotmail were analyzed with the intention of identifying particular hosts. Even when the data was anonymized, it was possible to identify hosts with a high degree of accuracy.

Read the rest of "Anonymous Research" at SQLServerCentral.