“Legal confidentiality is a shield for citizens.” These are the words of Shami Chakrabarti, the one-time director of the U.K.-based human rights group Liberty, speaking in 2018.

Well, it seems that this shield has just been broken, because researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland have published a study in which they were able to identify the participants in confidential legal cases, even though such participants had been anonymized. How did they do it? By using a combination of artificial intelligence and big data. By harnessing these technologies in tandem, the study’s authors could mine over 120,000 public legal records and then use an algorithm to identify connections between them.

Source: forbes.com
Author: Simon Chandler