Just when you thought you were safe, talking to people…

It’s possible to pair public information about yourself with private information about yourself – to de-anonymize the data with a strong level of confidence.  And if you can do this yourself, so can others, to your personal data.  If anyone can find some studies that prove me right, post links in the comments.  Otherwise, it makes for a better story if you simply assume I’m right, as you read the rest of this blog post.

As evidence, I offer you this graphic of my pages-read stat from Amazon.  It shows two pages read on Tuesday and three read on Thursday.  First thing about those numbers is that they are atypical.

Typically, my pages-read stats are zero for longer stretches of time.  Then, when they are not at zero, they hover around 25 or around 100.  Apparently, Kindle Unlimited readers average 25 pages read in a day, on the days they read.  Maybe some also average 100 pages read, or maybe there’s yet another reason for that lesser cluster.  I don’t know.

I do know who that reader is, because I talked to him on both those days.  He told me what he read.  Good ‘ole HUMINT.  The benefit of my super low stats, is that I can easily correlate what he told me with what I see in my stats.  I know that every move on this trend line is my collaborator reading my book.  Imagine the fun I could have.

I could post his progress online, in this blog, for the digital world to see.  I’m correlating two sources of his digital footprint, one gathered from a public conversation, the other obtained from somewhere else his tracks are being published, seemingly anonymously – Amazon Books.

I was able to de-anonymize my Amazon author stats out of the law of small numbers, in my case, typically zero, then only two and three, and because the reader told me he was reading pages.  Because I know these stats are his, I can assume pages read in subsequent days where I don’t talk to him, will be his.  Net, net, I will know his reading pace.  I’ll know if he finishes the book, with further correlation with what I know to be the book length.

I don’t think he’s overly concerned.  I showed him what I was doing.  His response?  “Privacy is a thing of the past.”