title: Response to Comment on "Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata".
abstract: Sánchez et al.'s textbook k-anonymization example does not prove, or even suggest, that location and other big-data data sets can be anonymized and of general use. The synthetic data set that they "successfully anonymize" bears no resemblance to modern high-dimensional data sets on which their methods fail. Moving forward, deidentification should not be considered a useful basis for policy.
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. yvesalexandre@demontjoye.com.
authors.forename: Yves-Alexandre
authors.initials: YA
authors.lastname: de Montjoye
authors.affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Alex Sandy
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Pentland
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce; D003625:Data Collection; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D008297:Male; D018907:Privacy