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Why is this Company Tracking Where You Are on Thanksgiving? (theoutline.com)
Earlier this week, several publications published a holiday-themed data study about how families that voted for opposite parties spent less time together on Thanksgiving, especially in areas that saw heavy political advertising. The data came from a company called SafeGraph that supplied publications with 17 trillion location markets for 10 million smartphones. A report looks at the bigger picture: The data wasn't just staggering in sheer quantity. It also appears to be extremely granular. Researchers "used this data to identify individuals' home locations, which they defined as the places people were most often located between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m.," wrote The Washington Post. The researchers also looked at where people were between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day in order to see if they spent that time at home or traveled, presumably to be with friends or family. "Even better, the cellphone data shows you exactly when those travelers arrived at a Thanksgiving location and when they left," the Post story says. To be clear: This means SafeGraph is looking at an individual device and tracking where its owner is going throughout their day. A common defense from companies that creepily collect massive amounts of data is that the data is only analyzed in aggregate; for example, Google's database BigQuery, which allows organizations to upload big data sets and then query them quickly, promises that all its public data sets are "fully anonymized" and "contain no personally-identifying information." In multiple press releases from SafeGraph's partners, the company's location data is referred to as "anonymized," but in this case they seem to be interpreting the concept of anonymity quite liberally given the specificity of the data.
Does the headline refer to Google or to Facebook?
#DeleteChrome
All these claims surfacing about Hollywood and Politicians having inappropriate relations with women from 20 years ago. Imagine the amount of blackmail dirt they will have in the next 20 years. Everything you do, say, and part of how you think (at least online) is being tracked and saved. It may not come back to haunt you but get rich, famous, or powerful enough and you might just find yourself writing checks to people to keep quite because you left your phone on when you went to a location that becomes unpopular 20 years in the future.
"Why is this Company Tracking Where You Are on Thanksgiving?"
Shitty privacy laws from shitty paid-for public "servants". Anything else is a distraction from that issue.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
From the OP:
"A common defense from companies that creepily collect massive amounts of data is that the data is only analyzed in aggregate; for example, Google's database BigQuery, which allows organizations to upload big data sets and then query them quickly, promises that all its public data sets are 'fully anonymized' and 'contain no personally-identifying information.' "
I think it is critically important that we [as the data subjects ] recognise an important distinction.
This statement would be equally true if the company:-
1. Collected all the data with maximum resolution
2. Stored that data in a maximum resolution data set
3. Created a transformation process that took the maximum resolution data, "anonymized it" as it was loaded into a queryable database
4. Ran queries of the database...
The point being that the wording is so specious and so perfect for leading you to jump to the wrong conclusion. In other words, unless the company actually comes out with, "We do not store or otherwise retain access to your data in original or non-anonymized form - and you can come audit us so we can prove it to you", then they are not to be trusted.
And remember, anything that is captured - even if not used as part of the company's commercial offering - can be subpoenad or demanded via NSL.
And if your company is doing something that is right on the edge of being shut down by i.e. privacy laws, then maybe one way of staying just inside the line of acceptability [to government] is to offer to share what you've got if they ask...
None of this is safe. None of it.
While a phone is indeed a locating device in order to function there is an extremely large difference between your cellphone company being able to locate you at a single moment in time should the need arise and "some company" storing everyone's location over time in order to build trend information and knowledge about you, your home, behaviour, family/friends, place of work, etc. A single point in time tells you nothing, even between 1-4am there is no guarantee on that day of that year you were asleep much less that you were at home, but tracking people over time does just this and is indeed frightening and literally defines digital stalking.
The author of the article might want to learn what words mean. They do typically have meanings, you know.
Anonymous data is data not identified with a particular person. It does not mean cannot be identified with a particular person. It also does not mean the data cannot be associated with itself over time.
Five-digit ZIP code areas are pretty big and are not particularly indicative of an individual. Cell tower coverage is typically more detailed than a five-digit ZIP code. ZIP code of residence is trivial to determine from mobile phone records: it’s where your phone spends the majority of the day. ZIP code of work place is also fairly easy to determine: it’s where your phone spends the majority of the day when it’s not at home. Associate these two ZIP codes, though, and the association is unique for about 90 to 95% of the US population. Therefore knowing these two ZIP codes means you have isolated an individual. All anonymity means is that this information, by itself, does not tell you who that individual is. You can find out, though, with a subpoena, not even a warrant—or a friendly employee of the wireless carrier—or if you have someone specific in mind and you know or can find out where they live and work.
It is useful to consider how powerful location data is. A phone goes to a cancer clinic twice a week but not five times a week in 8-hour blocks? The phone owner has cancer. A phone goes to an ob-gyn twice in a single month? The phone owner is pregnant. A phone goes to an ob-gyn once a month for three months running? The phone owner is trying to get pregnant. A phone goes to a particular church most Sunday mornings? The phone owner belongs to the denomination of that church. Two phones are sporadically at the same motel at the same time (even if the particular motel changes)? The phone owners are having an affair. And on and on it goes.
Because de-anonymizing data is so trivial, having access only to anonymous or anonymized data protects against absolutely nothing.
And yet in this particular story, anonymity was retained. You can identify households from individual location data alone, which the study did. You can identify likely political leanings from individual location data alone, which the study did. You don’t need to attach names to the individuals to study the individuals, and this study did not.
Anonymity does not mean you as an individual cannot be identified. It just means you haven’t been—yet.