The Pitfalls of Hashing for Privacy.

Boosted by recent legislations, data anonymization is fast becoming a norm. However, as of yet no generic solution has been found to safely release data. As a consequence, data custodians often resort to ad-hoc means to anonymize datasets. Both past and current practices indicate that hashing is often believed to be an effective way to anonymize data. Unfortunately, in practice it is only rarely e...