Interaction data are identifiable even across long periods of time

Fine-grained records of people’s interactions, both offline and online, are collected at large scale. These data contain sensitive information about whom we meet, talk to, and when. We demonstrate here how people’s interaction behavior is stable over long periods of time and can be used to identify individuals in anonymous datasets. Our attack learns the profile of an individual using geometric deep learning and triplet loss optimization. In a mobile phone metadata dataset of more than 40k people, it correctly identifies 52% of individuals based on their 2-hop interaction graph. We further show that the profiles learned by our method are stable over time and that 24% of people are still identifiable after 20 weeks. Our results suggest that people with well-balanced interaction graphs are more identifiable. Applying our attack to Bluetooth close-proximity networks, we show that even 1-hop interaction graphs are enough to identify people more than 26% of the time. Our results provide strong evidence that disconnected and even re-pseudonymized interaction data can be linked together making them personal data under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation

Descartes, René

Scholars generally consider René Descartes to be the father of early modern philosophy insofar he rejected scholasticism, Aristotelianism, but also Renaissance philosophies and grounded a new system of knowledge whose roots lie solely in the mind and not in previous assumptions. This defines a modern self that achieves the knowledge of nature and shapes the modern universe. In the Discours de la Méthode (1637) and the Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), after rejecting earlier education, doctrines, and scientiæ, Descartes isolates the powers of the mind (i.e., clear and distinct ideas) as the beginning of any certainty. Yet, having considered Descartes’ system as dismissing all doctrines and beliefs, in this entry I will first examine some relations between the French philosopher and those contexts and then discuss the novelties of his system. After a short biography, in the second section, I will briefly explore the interrelations between Descartes and Renaissance scholars, whom he reproached for their precipitate conclusions. Third, I will unearth his criticism of Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy (which he reproached for its preconceptions), while highlighting his attention to a few Aristotelian texts. Fourth, I will investigate a few innovative aspects of his methodology; this consists of novel combination of intellectual cognition and experimentation. As a result, Descartes’ entire natural philosophy consists of a theoretical framework that defines the principles of knowledge and the architecture of science, while the body of all disciplines and the knowledge of particular issues are methodologically and experientially constructed. Despite several limitations, Descartes’ system is remarkably innovative