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.

Comments

Re: Not a problem for me

[gnick]

Get out and meet a creationist and learn something about the world you live in.

Like Jane Goodall?

Who knows, maybe you will find they arnt just simple stupid people like you think and they may find that you arnt the spawn of Satan like they think.

Not all Creationists are stupid; I'm convinced that intelligent people existed even before Darwin. And there is a wide range of specific beliefs among people who call themselves Creationists. But that doesn't stop me from lumping them in with the people who say the earth isn't heating up or that vaccines cause autism. Some intelligent people believe some stupid shit.