The New York Times ran an article today entitled “How Privacy Vanishes Online“. It is a nice summary of what has mostly been reported separately up until now. We all know that we are revealing a lot of personal information online and we should watch our privacy settings and be aware of scams. However, many of us do not realize that we are not anonymous online – or more than ever before – offline.

Simply put, data mining is the analysis of a large set of data to find patterns and then predict things. What the New York Times is telling us is that we are providing a lot of pieces of personal data that when analyzed in one set can predict not just our behaviors but reveal our identities. No-one is anonymous and this is not a television show!

So maybe we need to evaluate our definitions of privacy. As nonprofits, we need to ensure we have a privacy policy that defines how we maintain our own information but it is also very important that it covers how we work with outside vendors.

For example, if our donor database is hosted online, what does that mean in terms of privacy? Will the vendor be collecting and using any of the information? ANY INFORMATION is a new thought. As the smart folks at the University of Texas and Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated, it is not enough anymore to strip data of typical identifiers and feel confident it is anonymous.