Does Hashing Make Data “Anonymous”?
One of the most misunderstood topics in privacy is what it means to provide “anonymous” access to data. One often hears references to “hashing” as a way of rendering data anonymous. As it turns out, hashing is vastly overrated as an “anonymization” technique. In this post, I’ll talk about what hashing is, and why it often fails to provide effective anonymity. What is hashing anyway? What we’re talking about is technically called a “cryptographic...