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

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.'"

Comments

Contradiction

[jklovanc]

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.

Re:Seems ridiculously easy

[Dazza]

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.

Incorrect

[rjstanford]

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

From TFA: "What may surprise you is that this record includes unique customer identifiers, as well as the location and date/time for the start and end of each journey."

The unique ID? Yeah, maybe that's a problem, likely not that big a deal but also easy enough to get rid of (although if we do that, we lose the ability to track joined journeys, identify frequent vs. infrequent users, &c. But that's not the point here.

Identifying which bike stations you check a bike out from and return a bike to is very different from identifying your movements across London. Very different indeed. I'd argue that you do have an expectation of privacy when you stop along the way to get a cup of coffee, a bit of nookie, or a gyro. As a public transportation user, though, your checkin and checkout actions are totally different than your route.

In fact, it'd be damned useful to be able to see and show that you did - or did not - retrieve or return a bike at a particular place and time. Its also useful to be able to tell where that bike went in the future.

Think about library books. Even in the "olden days," it was frequently possible to see who checked out a book, when they got it, and when they returned it. You couldn't, however, tell whether or not they liked it, if they read it in the bathtub, or if they let their SO read a page or two along the way.

Same here, just with bikes. Sorry guys, no news.