Pete Warden discusses why anonymized social media datasets can be so easy to match up again:
“[T]his anonymization process is an illusion. Precisely because there are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone’s actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records. Arvind first demonstrated this when he and his fellow researcher took the “anonymous” dataset released as part of the first Netflix prize, and demonstrated how he could correlate the movie rentals listed with public IMDB reviews. That let them identify some named individuals, and then gave access to their complete rental histories. More recently, he and his collaborators used the same approach to win a Kaggle contest by matching the topography of the anonymized and a publicly crawled version of the social connections on Flickr. They were able to take two partial social graphs, and like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, figure out fragments that matched and represented the same users in both.” (via)