Complete anonymity is a very high standard. This is honor system anonymity. He told you it's anonymous because he's going to protect your anonymity in the data analysis. Do you consider your IP address to be personally identifying information? You should - it's not anonymous at all. Yet, by navigating to his survey you gave it to him. Had you ever edited Wikipedia using your IP address (even by accident) he could have easily determined your actual user based on editing patterns.
This was demonstrated recently with the Netflix Prize. Netflix went to some length to anonymize the dataset, but by cross linking editing patterns across services the researchers were able to deanonymize a good portion of the dataset.
"How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset" http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105
So I find your concern unwarranted.
Cheers, Brian
On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/13/08, Isto Huvila isto.huvila@abo.fi wrote:
The individual answers will be processed strictly confidential, the
data
will not be handed over to any third parties or to non-academic use and all informants will remain strictly anynomous.
Personally speaking, I found it jarring that you ask for the exact name of the article to which the respondent contributed, in an "anonymous" survey. For me, for example, frequently I am the only contributor to the articles I edit, so all "anonymity" is lost. Perhaps that was your intention, but it seemed odd. So I stopped at that point.
Steve
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