ICO: Mash-ups further complicate data privacy

Watchdog says sophisticated analytics is posing a growing threat to anonymity

Understanding how supposedly anonymous information could be mashed together and analysed with other data already in the public domain is one of the biggest challenges facing the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

This is the opinion of Graham Smith, deputy commissioner and director of freedom of information at the ICO, speaking at an event called 'An Information War' last week.

"There's a huge issue around knowing what information is already there in the public domain. Looking at anonymised disclosures of information and understanding how it might be mashed with other data is one of the biggest challenges for us," said Smith.

Smith added that the courts make judgments as to whether information is sufficiently anonymous on a case-by-case basis.

He gave the example of anonymised information that was released last year on late abortions and highlighted the challenge of making sure information is truly anonymous.

"Are those statistics genuinely anonymised so that other information out there cannot be used to identify those people?" he said.

Former government CIO John Suffolk added that enterprise data is affected too.

"We're talking about protecting personal or commercial data. As that data becomes cumulative, smart people are applying inference engines and running analyses that previously we'd never have believed possible."

The InfoWar event examined the balance between national security, trade secrets and the rights of the individual.