
Australian Bank Anonymizes and Releases Billions of Records - estromlund
http://peoplelikeu.com.au/
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derrida
I punched in my details and there are approximately 100 people like me. What
has occurred to me is that people like me (20's, single) that live in rich
mobile areas of Sydney spend less than the national average across most
things, and overall. But also, compared to people like me, I get away with
about 1/8th of what everybody else spends, and do not feel poor. To the
contrary in fact.

What is going on here? I am inclined to believe the data.

What this has really reinforced for me is the extent to which other people
must spend their income as it comes in. It has also reinforced the importance
of my friends, connections, values & personal knowledge. My friends who enable
me to live a life that feels rich whilst, apparently, spending about 1/8th of
what everybody else does.

I really am surprised. I was not raised frugally and if I want something and
have the money, I generally buy it & I don't need more than I have.

~~~
viraptor
A couple of guesses:

\- single does not mean no kids

\- once you are in debt, you may have problems getting out of it (you spend a
lot on credit repayment rates)

\- does spending include investment? for example would a life insurance /
retirement fund count towards "spending"?

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jacques_chester
Given the history of people being identified from "anonymous" records (thanks
a _lot_ , information theory) ... well, I'm glad I'm not banking with the NAB.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
You misunderstand. This is not an anonymous data-dump like the AOL fiasco, and
there is no way to get any raw data.

Basically you just pick a few things like your age, salary and where you live,
and then out of all of the people out there "like you", you're shown an
average of where people like you tend to spend their money (travel, food,
etc.).

Even if you spent a lot of time manipulating the data to try and get it to
tell you one person's spending by category (assuming it were possible), the
data would be relatively meaningless.

~~~
jacques_chester
Thanks; I was thrown by the title.

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dfc
For what its worth they have not "released" the data. I cannot copy any of the
text from the FAQ section but if you browse the FAQs and "about this site" it
looks like the whole site is basically an ad/demo of Market Blueprint[1]. But
I could be wrong. estromiund, do you know where they released the data?

[1] <http://www.quantium.com.au/market-blueprint>

~~~
anthonys
That's correct. It is Market Blueprint in a pretty, consumer skin.

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boyter
I wonder how accurate this actually is... I punched in my details and
apparently for my details there are less then 10 people like me. Considering
where I live, age etc... that seems unlikely.

~~~
kerno
Same. It is clear now that I am a beautiful snowflake.

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mmahemoff
If they didn't acknowledge the well-known risks and how they got around them,
they will have some concerned customers and questions from regulators.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak>

Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets
<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf> Regarding Netflix's
competition: "We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit
about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in
the dataset."

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hn-miw-i
Interesting, as a customer of ubank I was concerned with the concept,
especially after the data deanonymization techniques developed post AOL and
Netflix.

However after using the site and entering my demographics (all public
properties) I could see that I was like 56 people in area; their base spending
patterns did not reflect me at all and I felt like a snowflake. Sometimes big
data makes you feel special.

At no time was I shown transactions, merely aggrigate figures in categories.
No privacy issue here, keep being decent and ethical national bank!

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cmaitchison
I'd say the initial 6 questions are modelled on Census data, not anonymous
bank records.

~~~
pserwylo
I agree. I am with this bank, and after seeing this was curious as to what
information they actually have about me. Looking at the "My Details" section
of the site shows only the following info:

\- Name

\- Phone

\- Email

\- Address

\- Tax File Number (not unlike a US social security number)

I came to the same conclusion that its probably based on census data.

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pr0tocoldan
Is anyone aware of what method they used to make the data anonymous? I'm
currently doing research in data masking tools and would be interested to know
about the techniques used and the performance of the tool.

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xmodem
Kind of cool, but I bank with the bank in question (Ubank / National Australia
Bank) and I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable that they'd use my
transaction history like this.

~~~
Volpe
If your identity isn't attached... it isn't your history. It's just 'a'
history.

~~~
BigTigger
I work for an Australian Bank. We had an internal competition where they
didn't sanitise the data for this competition well enough. After a week of
analysing the data one of the people in competing in the competition knew
who's data we were looking at. It was a friend of theirs.

All identifying information had been removed/sanitised, they could tell from
looking at the spending habits.

I disagree with your statement.

~~~
Volpe
... So they knew, because they already knew. So really they just confirmed.

Ask that person to go and find my details, and they will surely fail. Because
they know nothing about me, and the transaction history doesn't tell them
anything... thus it is not 'identifying'.

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lucaspiller
I put in my numbers to see what it would be like living on the other side of
the world (I'm in Dublin, Ireland - it is currently 9C and raining) using the
Sydney postcode 2000.

It says my expected house & home costs are $2000, which seems rather high for
me. In London and here in Dublin, pretty much everyone my age (mid twenties)
is in a houseshare, so we would pay that for the whole property, but split it
three ways or so. Is housing just that much more expensive, or what?

~~~
chris_wot
You only picked one of the most expensive postcodes - that's the Sydney CBD!
Yes, it is VERY expensive. In fact, it is _very_ expensive to live in Sydney,
full stop.

Try using a 40?? postcode for Queensland.

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codelion
If we go by the history of such anonymization attempts (AOL, Netflix) it is
only a matter of time that someone figures out how to get PII from this data.

~~~
veemjeem
I think the title is misleading for the purposes of catching people's
attention. The data is not available to download, and is in aggregate form.
The AOL data was not in aggregate form, so it was possible to get personalized
details.

They probably constructed a simple decision tree aggregate which is probably
less than 10kb of data. I doubt anyone could extrapolate 10kb data into
personalized details of an individual.

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softgrow
Spooky. Tried it out and found it's prediction accurate for brands and
companies I might use. Which was disappointing in a way, I was hoping I might
find something new to try. Instead I'm well, just like me....

~~~
nopassrecover
Wasnt even close for me. Not sure if the data's poor for my demographic or I'm
atypical.

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pan69
Nice idea but an absolute terrible website. E.g. If you go into the about
section and expand one the questions you get this weirdo scroll bar. Seems
like they're forcing the layout into a fixed dimension.

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some1else
You can see where rich people eat.

