I think they're suggesting that anonymized and potentially aggregated data can still have individual data extracted from it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-...

What the heck? Where did I say either of those things?

Privacy is very important. That's why I think sharing of customer data - individual or aggregate - is bad.

You asked why someone would think aggregating would make it better.

Aggregating protects privacy when done properly.

It seems pretty obvious to me that sharing individual data is orders of magnitude worse than sharing aggregated data.

If you think they're the same, then you don't seem to value the privacy that aggregation provides.

So what am I misrepresenting about what you said?

I'm tired of false equivalences. One thing that's maybe slightly bad, and another thing that's super-super-bad, aren't equally bad.

>Aggregating protects privacy when done properly.

When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there. Time and time again it's been found most aggregates are not filtered properly and be deanonymized with eaze.

It's not that one is big bad, and one is little bad, it's the little bad can become big bad with a small amount of work by an attacker/company. Then when you add in zero external third party verification of these company claims, you really don't have any reason to believe them.

> When done properly is going a lot of heavy lifting there.

Not really. There are common practices for it. Yes it hits HN when deanonymization can happen at a well-known company, just like it hits HN when there's a security vulnerability that gets patched at a well-known company.

But "it's the little bad can become big bad" is what's doing the heavy lifting in your argument. No, that's not how it works. There's no universe in which aggregate data can be deanonymized to anywhere close to what all of the individual profiles would be. It's a completely false equivalenace, period.

And I'm tired of people acting like companies putting on a show of protecting our privacy is doing anything actually helpful. But you're right. I'm wrong and clearly don't care about privacy.

As a completely unrelated aside, I wonder how much social progress is hindered by people alienating people on their own side.

Just don't make false equivalences.

It's easy, just admit the two are not the same and move on. You don't need to get defensive about it. "I wonder" how much social progress is hindered by people making wrong statements and then getting defensive about it? Or by making snarky "completely unrelated" asides?