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Google's Sidewalk Labs Plans To Sell Location Data On Millions of Cellphones (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like "SimCity." A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that. The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city's patterns of movement. Like "SimCity," Replica's "user-friendly" tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It's an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They're not completely sure where the data is coming from.
Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, "Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they're using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school)." To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations -- creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city's real-world patterns but that "obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people," as Bowden told The Intercept. The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data -- and raises new questions about Google's encroachment on the physical world.
Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, "Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they're using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school)." To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations -- creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city's real-world patterns but that "obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people," as Bowden told The Intercept. The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data -- and raises new questions about Google's encroachment on the physical world.
It's Anonymized. This is a non-issue. The data will help design better cities.
If they'll do that, it will be for billions.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
This is Google, once they collected your data, they WILL sell it.
If you believe otherwise, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
Hope legal control will enforce rules equivalent to what we see today in Denmark with bluetooth traffic trackers.
- All tracked devices will be anonymized/hashed with a key changed at least 2 times per day. So same device will not have the same ID day after day, and not when he goes to work, and when go comes home.
- To emulate the danish system of larger roads only, google should remove a random legnth in the beginning and end of the routes. say 100-200 meters in the city end. And more in the rural end (no congestion) say 200-500 meters. Or they should just deliver data from congested roads, no earlier than 100-200 meters from the city end start.
That would make people anonymous, yet give very good data for the city planners.
But I thought AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile stated that they'll no longer sell location data...
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has said that ~"billionaires are immoral." and it's apparent that a vocal percentage of Google employees are aligned with AOC.
There have been a number of incidents where Google employees for some reason felt they had a vote in how their company was run - even though they all entered into mutual agreements called "contracts" where no where in those contracts there was a "employees get to vote on the types of business Google decides to take on."
Seems that this "collect and monetize personal data, as long as it makes money," is heading towards a conflict with the socialist AOC leftist wing who will seek to curb (read "re distribute") excesses of private companies.
Should be fun to watch: Unlimited, unfettered capitalism plus privacy plus leftist employees. Stir and watch it smolder.
Commonsense unsurprising article. Shame on slashdot editor.
Plus Facebook, the cellphone companies, those third parties running all the traffic cameras and red light cameras in your city, etc.
The hellish dystopia we were warned about is gathering momentum and not enough people are looking around and going 'THIS IS ENOUGH!'
Being a Google-controlled company, the news would have been if they had decided NOT to sell that data.
I hope this practice get squashed under avalanche of privacy-related lawsuits.
What Evoogle doing with this is in effect asserting that if they can track any electronic device that you have on you, then they can associate it with your identity and sell resulting location data to the highest bidder in any form without you having any say in this. They don't need to actually have any business relationship or agreement with you, it is sufficient that they can fingerprint and identify your electronic device to own your data.
This is nothing more then self fulfilling their own vision of what a city should be. It will show that yes, those other bastard policies you created do infact force people into behaviours. Are they good long term or even wanted though, NO. Simplest example is using this data for Policing. Having lived in a city where they did exactly that, and saw the horrid outcome I can say it's bullshit. They were using data on crime rates to justify increased Policiing... well congradulations, more Police means more people will be arrested when everything we do in life breaks some law. That DOESN'T MEAN IT'S GOOD.
In Google's case they will use this data to justify building infrastructure with no regard to things like environment nor current population. A wide open field is seen as missed profit. Walkways are judged not on their logistical merit but "safety", which leads to more being built across major roadways. It's unlikely they will even look at the stats later to see just how stupid their descsions were.
tl;DR - Fuck off Google.
> Differential privacy is a rigorous mathematical definition of privacy ...
That was informative, thank you.
Data which has been anonymized poorly, if the raw data is distributed rather than statistics, can sometimes be de-anonymized. I see differential privacy mathematically guarantees that the statistics they provide cannot be de-anonymized back to data about individuals.
What you said is true, but not relevant.
Google is distributing statistics about large populations, not tokenized data about individuals.
Tokenized data (raw data with names replaced by numbers) can sometimes be de-anonymized. That's not what Google is doing.
This doesn't accurately represent a wide variety of demographics such as that of seniors, children, and likely includes faked location data as well from tons of Pokemon players.
Worthless.
I'm not sure why people can't read or understand what the paragraph is talking about. In a nutshell, Google collects data on where you go via applications like google maps. It shouldn't be a mystery to anyone who uses it because how is is Google asking you to review a restaurant or business you visited. Google would like to provide data to advertisers and city planners but they can't give them the raw data even without names attached because if you can identify where and when someone was, there's a risk it could be used to track someone. Instead they make up a virtual city sort of like the Sims in sim city with similar overall habits to the original data so there's no risk of individuals being identified.
So... it looks to me as though this data will be heavily biased towards users of Android. Surely that's not good for urban planners? People with other brands of smartphone or (gasp) no smartphones, surely their activities would affect urban planners too?
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
I do not have even a dumb phone, let alone a smart phone. I do not need 24/7 connection to other people or to the Internet. Thus, my activities would not be tracked.
All this reminds me of the polling for a U.S. presidential election during the 1930s. The poll predicted a Republican win against Franklin Roosevelt. The problem was that the poll was conducted entirely by phone. The pollster was thus talking to those who, during the Great Depression, could afford phones -- mostly Republicans. Data from Sidewalk Labs' will be similarly biased, this time in favor of those who are slaves to their mobile phones.
For example, Apple doesn't sell the information, instead, they keep you in the walled garden and lease access to you. It's a much better model, as it has richer victims. Google's data is only useful for city planning, keep the poor people moving. Apple's data is way too valuable to sell.
"ability to model an entire city's patterns of movement"
That's right. We, the 99%, are statistical data. Just as scientists study the movement of butterflies, whales, migrating birds and ants, we are the subject of scrutiny. Not as unique individuals who have our own special formula at Starbucks, but as a horde. A herd. A quantity.
Are we wrong to imagine our uniqueness? Are the patterns of our life not special to each of us? Surely we aren't a mass of seven billion clones!
Actually, this can be a liberating way of thinking. To the extent that we think of ourselves as 'special', we create problems for ourselves. We are then forced to do things that demonstrate our individuality, and those things pretty much always fail and make us look foolish. Just relax. Go with the (literal) flow. Realize that you are just a pimple on the ass of the universe and your life will go smoothly.
...omphaloskepsis often...
As I drive my daily commute in a major tech hub where roads cross many city and county jurisdictions, I have to wonder if city planners are aware of actual traffic distributions on major and minor roadways. I see roads being repaved that don't see a lot of traffic at the expense of ones that do. I see the same entry and exit points congested month after month, with no hint that city planners are aware they are bottlenecks and should be expanded. I see single lane exits from one major highway to another with plenty of unused buffer space on each side to add another lane, or two. I see traffic lights out of whack and I see specific highway entry points where entitled EV car owners try to move from the right most lane to the left most 'express' lane because they have an EV sticker, while slowing every one in the intermediate lanes because this guy (or gal) has the "right" to use the express lane.
If this effort will provide more insight into such patterns while aggregating the data statistically, I am all for it.
Caltrans, are you f* listening?
I know the title was just lifted from the article, but it should read "Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs Plans To Sell Location Data On Millions of Cellphones"
The second sentence of the summary says it is being done by an Alphabet subsidiary, which would make it a "sibling" of Google.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Bounty hunters know who to bribe to reidentify the phone users.
Get the fuck out of our lives you assholes.
Only the total number of people with active mobile devices.
Be stealthy. no mobile devices, only use cash. You are now "invisible" to the corporate big brother.
What an odd way to illiterately say "I don't know.
Surety means 100%. Anything less isn't "not completely sure" it's either "unsure" or "don't know."
E
In the US and Canada it's also used against you, but they pretend that corporations actually care about consumers, when the consumers are actually the product, and treated only as a profit center.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wiped Google's stock off my Nexus 6 and loaded the Lineage reroll of MicroG.
That belongs to me, thank you very much.
In my town there is a retirement home which houses 800+ on a street that's not especially busy, but a downtown artery nonetheless. Most of the residents have mobility issues, but aren't bed-ridden. They literally had to blockade the street multiple times in protest to get a crosswalk installed by the city.
Sure, the boomer generation is probably the last that's not saturated with cellular users. But there's still a huge number with 25+ years to go, and if anything they're more dependent on city infrastructure than anyone. It's a common theme for city councilors to promise to build benches to woo elderly voters who can't walk far without resting, for example.
This doesn't have to dominate infrastructure strategy, it's just a tool. But so are politicians...
This.
I'm surprised anyone still believes Big Brother Google makes their money from _advertising_. It's been obvious for quite a while now that they are in the dystopian mass surveillance and censorship business. They just claim it's for "advertising purposes" so people will think it's merely annoying rather than unamerican and full-on evil.
Who would pay for dystopia? Probably not companies selling widgets. But repressive regimes - sure, I bet they would fork out quite a pretty penny for Big Bother Google's services.
It's time for President Trump to get out his trust-busting stick. Break up Alphabet!
Android - separate company
Chrome - separate company
YouTube - separate company
Gmail - separate company
Search - separate company
Advertising - separate company
Maps - separate company
Arrest Sundar Pichai and the executive team. Destroy all the mass surveillance data. Shut down the dangerous mad science projects. Arrest the nazi mad scientists. Shut down the wannabe-Skynet AI. Arrest those mad scientists too.
Stop Google before it's too late!