But it was only an early mile marker in Sweeney’s career; in 2000, she showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex.
Latanya Sweeney’s (hard to find) draft research on the topic, seems to indicate 87% identifiable, however, Philippe Goll, revisted her study and was only able to reproduce 61-63% hit rate.
This is still a rather spectacular hit rate in my opinion.
I always thought data mining was boring.