alt Hacker NewsLet's say you've got a system that collects medical data - like "store the results of the MRI right after it happens".
For analysis reasons, you want to share this dataset (e.g. for diagnostics on the machine) but first must strip it of potentially identifying information.
The uuidv7 timestamp could be used to re-identify the data through correlation - "I know this person got an MRI on this day, there's only one record with a matching datestamp, thus I know it's their MRI."
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Fair enough, thanks... I've got more experience in education/elearning, banking and elections, all of which are likely to have separate timestamp records required anyway, so this kind of scenario didn't really jump out at me.
Good example.
It's pretty simple, unless when you provide a GUID to a party you are also willing to provide the timestamp when it was created, use UUIDv4.
I'm not sold on this example. If you're already preprocessing data for analysis purposes, why not just remove the ID altogether? I can't imagine a specific record ID being required for analytics