Leaving personal and/or sensitive information in plain text is problematic on a number of levels, including privacy. Fortunately there are folks working on plain text solutions. CNET Editor at large, Michael Kanellos said he finds data randomization “appealing.” He then writes about IBM working on data randomization being used for masking personal information.

If IBM is right, corporate databases in the future might record your age as 157 and your income as the square root of two. Big Blue is experimenting with an idea for customer databases called data randomization. The technique will, conceivably, preserve consumer privacy by masking data such as income, age, past purchases or medical information through mathematical calculations that can’t be unwound.

Of course history has proven that there is pretty much no puzzle the human mind creates that can’t be solved somewhere, some place, some time. Some wizard will figure out how to decrypt whatever IBM comes up with, and then the cat and mouse game will continue on ad infinitum. But whatever they do come up with should be much better than plain text.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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