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Comment on The Privacy Theater of Hashed PIIparent

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If it's not stored alongside the hash it's not a salt, it's something else.

That is not even true. The definition in the article does not substantiate it. There is no requirement for the salt to be stored alongside the hash.

The definition in the article is sufficiently clear. This is all that a salt is:

a salt is random data fed as an additional input to a one-way function that hashes data

With regard to effective anonymization, the salt is stored by the generator, but not in the exported dataset.

If the "salt" is kept secret then I agree you can't brute force all the phone numbers so easily. But I don't agree that "salt" is the correct term for that technique.

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