Further Reading: Ghost Targets

This article from Ars Technica talks about the personally-identifying information available in large corporate databases, the efforts these corporations make to conceal identities when they do share their (incredibly valuable) datasets to researchers, and the ineffectiveness of those efforts.

The article ends with a call-to-arms for legislation to handle these things, and preserve privacy, which seems to me like a strange cap on an article all about the futility of such efforts. People cling to that old idea, though.

Anyway, the part I find most fascinating (and the real focus of the article) is the remarkably simple process of correlating readily available information from vastly different datasets to create a useful connection. That's fundamental to Hathor, but for my novels I posited an imaginary, universal database architecture to make it happen. Turns out you can match spreadsheets against text lists and get the same effect today. That's impressive.