University of North Carolina legal scholars Andrew Chin and Anne Klinefelter look at the problem of “reidentification” and how Facebook appears to have solved it. The basic problem is that we say that data has been anonymized if you remove someone’s name, but in reality, that’s not true. Many different studies have shown that by combining outside data with the output of a database, it’s not that difficult to reidentify someone. For example:

Latanya Sweeney, then a graduate student at MIT, merged presumably anonymized Massachusetts state worker hospital records with voter registration records and was able to identify rather quickly the health records of then-Governor William Weld.30 Sweeney later published a broader study finding that 87% of the 1990 U.S. Census population could be indentified using only gender, zip code, and full date of birth, and others reproduced this work in the 2000 Census with 63% success in identifying individuals.

This is a big problem. Big enough that University of Colorado privacy and legal scholar Paul Ohm declared anonymization the core problem with our current world’s “broken promises of privacy.”

In good news, I can use Gmail now conscious free that having my name attached to things doesn’t matter.

Fast forward some years and Facebook’s design may not be what it once was. But watch out. Last year, they acquired the design firm Sofa. Then, of course, there was Instagram and its design team. And then Lightbox, makers of a nice Android photosharing app. The list goes on and on. Wilson Miner, who helped redesign Apple.com, just left Rdio for a new gig at Facebook. Lastly, they just acqui-hired the design usability firm Bolt | Peters.

Add it up and we have to agree with Flipboard designer Dider Hilhorst’s declaration, “Facebook design is the team to beat.” And notice how many of those hires had to do with A) mobile B) photos or C) both.

Also don’t forget Gowalla. But I think the problem with designing a gorgeous Facebook is the legacy involved: Facebook is a platform just as much as a social network. There are limits to what any team, no matter how talented, can do.

In the parlance of the modern-day right, Europe means several things: weakness, socialism, un-Americanism. Europe is not so much a swear-word as it is a sneer-word.