An Experience with a De-identifying Task to Inform About Privacy Issues

People tend to value their privacy, but are usually unaware about the extent to which their personal information is exposed through ordinary data available online. In this paper we describe an experience in which a group of students worked to identify a group of people from partial data that had been stripped of any direct identifiers, such as name or identification number. The students were successful in the assigned task, and as an indirect consequence, there was an increase of interest in the topic of privacy. With the partial evidence collected from this case, we argue that a hands-on, exercise-solving approach could be adapted to communicate privacy issues more effectively.