How three small credit card transactions could reveal your identity

Just three small clues—receipts for a pizza, a coffee and a pair of jeans—are enough information to identify a person’s credit card transactions from among those of a million people, according to a new study.

The findings, published in the journal Science, add to other research showing that seemingly anonymous data sets may not protect people’s privacy under rigorous analysis.

“The fact that a few data points are enough to uniquely identify an individual was true in credit card metadata,” said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, an MIT graduate student and one of the study’s authors.

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