Response to comment on "unique in the shopping mall: On there identifiability of credit card metadata"

Abstract

Sánchez et al.'s textbook k-anonymization example does not prove, or even suggest, that location and other big-data data sets can be anonymized and of general use. The synthetic data set that they "successfully anonymize" bears no resemblance to modern highdimensional data sets on which their methods fail. Moving forward, deidentification should not be considered a useful basis for policy.