Can Anonymisation Still Work?

The concept of anonymising data is a simple one to grasp. For any number of different reasons real data is taken and a process applied to it, removing or obscuring any part of it deemed too sensitive for release, creating anonymised data. Most commonly this is used to create test data so that development teams can work with data similar to their live environments, but without the security constraints applied to live systems. Sometimes anonymised data is released, either to academic groups or to the public at large. As Paul Ohm has pointed out in an article on Social Science Research Network and discussion in his blog, there are major complexity problems with anonymising data from the internet.