Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

London's Public Bike Data Can Tell Everyone Where You've Been

Posted by timothy on from the away-from-flat-call-in-the-burglary-lorry dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I recently posted this article with a few vizualizations and a bit of analysis about the risks associated with open data sets. Thought it might be of interest of Slashdot readers: 'This article is about a publicly available dataset of bicycle journey data that contains enough information to track the movements of individual cyclists across London, for a six month period just over a year ago.'"

3 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Contradiction by jklovanc · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the article;

    and with a little effort, it's possible to find the actual people who have made the journeys.

    because (thankfully) it requires a fair bit of effort to actually identify individuals from the data

    Is it "a little effort" or " a fair bit of effort"? The never go into what would need to be done to get the identity information.

  2. Re:Seems ridiculously easy by Dazza · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not that simple.

    You can't track from 'your house' to 'your work'. The tracking data is for London's bike hire scheme. These are picked up from specific 'docking points' around the city, and are returned to any docking point.

    So you can only get 'station to station' data.

    --
    -- "I know that this is vitriol, no solution, spleen-venting, but I feel better having screamed, don't you ?"
  3. Um, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The dataset contains a Bike ID, not a customer ID. You can get the dataset yourself and look.

    http://www.tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/our-feeds#on-this-page-4

      And one of the suggestions they have is to map the bike journeys.

    There is a similar set for the underground.