Emerging technologies like homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs can definitely help organizations approach zero-trace personal data anonymization. These and similar techniques can bring datasets to a near-zero-trace status, even achieving it in limited cases. There’s a major force that’s acting against efforts at implementing the zero-trace paradigm, though, and it’s difficult to discuss this paradigm without delving into what undermines it.
Put simply, personal data has to come from somewhere before anonymization can even be considered. For very large datasets of personal information covering broad swaths of the population, the data broker industry remains the most practical source for many applications. Unfortunately, data brokers have proven themselves incapable of securing the almost exclusively plaintext datasets they hold.
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