How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time. Probably not.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like , and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched. Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number. Never trust profile pictures [video]