"Can Anyone Be Completely Anonymous?"
Vasileios Chatzistefanou and Konstantinos Limniotis, researchers at the Open University of Cyprus, did a study on the security of five anonymous social media applications to find out if they allow third parties to access personal data or track users. The anonymization of personal data is supposed to ensure that users' privacy is protected from data mining and data publishing systems. However, user privacy is not guaranteed despite the removal of personal identifiers. Characteristics of the data can be used to create a unique fingerprint through the application of different techniques. This fingerprint can then be used to determine the identity of a user. This article continues to discuss the aim of data anonymization, the characteristics that can be used to identify users in a data set, and findings of personal data processing in anonymous applications.