Why is this Company Tracking Where You Are on Thanksgiving? (theoutline.com) 98
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.
Be more specific (Score:4, Insightful)
Does the headline refer to Google or to Facebook?
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Yes.
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The harm is the loss of privacy without explicitly choosing to give it up. There's no need for any further harm.
This kind of thing should be terrifying to people in general as this means that stalkers and criminals can track where they are when planning crimes. And don't give me any crap about not having a stalker, nobody has a stalker until they have a stalker.
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The problem is that people did explicitly choose that, they just didn't bother to understand this fact.
People have been pointing out for literally years that exactly this is what was happening, and that it would keep happening.
People agreed to an EULA they didn't read, which explicitly gave the company the right to do this, and to change the terms of the contract at any point according to their whims.
The problem is the average cons
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There *should* be no record if people read the ToS and agreed to it. But if they don't agree, they can't get installed. It's kind of a hostage situation. I implicitly and explicitly don't install apps that track.
But if you're on of the 3+billion android users, then I'm guessing tracks you *anyway*. Perhaps Samsung does, or Apple.
We have few ways of determining phone-homes on phones if they're done over the air, rather than being trapped through a wifi link (watching nmap, as an example). I don't trust them,
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If you have nothing to hide why are you so concerned about us having all these details about you?
Having nothing to hide doesn't make all of my information public by default
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Having something to hide doesn't make it private either :)
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Since I work until 2 AM, I must have been in the office, and I do have several female co-workers, none of which are my wife. It's an open space office so... does it count as "one room"?
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You have cancer? We were about to hire you, but we don't want you contaminating our health insurance pool.
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If I had cancer I would stop giving a shit about working or anything else and live the small rest of my life peacefully, doing what I want to do for a change. Must be my chronic depression saying that, but I indeed like the idea.
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Neither you nor anyone you know has ever been bullied or harassed in your entire life? Nothing you own has ever been vandalized or stolen? Just for a few minutes, as a thought experiment, imagine if you weren't so lucky and/or oblivious to your surroundings.
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THIS headline refers to SafeGraph, but you'd be a fool to think that G and FB don't do it too.
Which was my point.
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Does the headline refer to Google or to Facebook?
It's more likely an AI in the background performing metrics for the FEMA camps. A little paranoia is good, a lot of paranoia is governmental emphasis on the mental. Once again, human stupidity will outshine any AI.
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Tovarishch, all this talk of Russian interference is absurd.
Does this tea taste like polonium to you?
Re: Not a problem for me (Score:1)
People tend to hang out with those that are like minded. I'm sure many KKK members in Alabama feel the same way about black people. In fact, one of the core methods of fighting ignorance is integration. Get out and meet a creationist and learn something about the world you live in. 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.
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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.
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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.
You know, there is a significant difference between beliefs in things that cannot ever be proven or disproven and things that can be.
Creationism deals with something that can never be proven. It isn't supposed to be the same as "evolution", but many evolutionists confuse evolution with "how life began". Evolution as "changes over time" have been observed; there is little doubt it exists. How life originated cannot be observed.
Science is not intended to deal with answering questions of how something in the
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Creationism deals with something that can never be proven. It isn't supposed to be the same as "evolution", but many evolutionists confuse evolution with "how life began". Evolution as "changes over time" have been observed; there is little doubt it exists. How life originated cannot be observed.
When I hear "Creationist", I infer the emergence of Man, not the emergence of life. Many Creationists believe that the two are equivalent. No argument from me that the origin of life is a mystery. But the origin of Man was a different event and we have pretty good observable evidence that it wasn't spontaneous.
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When I hear "Creationist", I infer the emergence of Man, not the emergence of life.
"Creationist" is the belief that God created the universe, including the Earth, Man, and all of the animal and plant life here. It isn't limited to just "Man". When you talk about putting Creationists in the same barrel as others, you have to use their definition of their label, because that's the definition that they use.
In any case, the argument is the same. The "emergence of Man" is a fact that science cannot prove. It can propose theories, but there is no way to prove which one is right, if any.
No argument from me that the origin of life is a mystery. But the origin of Man was a different event
Then y
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I applied a label that is popularly claimed, 'Creationist', to a subset of my own definition. That was unfair, inadequately clarified, and confusing.
When I said that the emergence of Man wasn't spontaneous, what I meant was that we're pretty sure it was gradual.
In any case, the argument is the same. The "emergence of Man" is a fact that science cannot prove. It can propose theories, but there is no way to prove which one is right, if any.
We can make a pretty damned good guess.
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When I said that the emergence of Man wasn't spontaneous, what I meant was that we're pretty sure it was gradual.
What does "pretty sure" mean? If it is anything other than "it's the best hypothesis that we can test against", then it's too strong a phrase. We simply do not know.
We can make a pretty damned good guess.
Which is nothing close to proof, and miles from "know". It's a belief based on facts that are not known -- which is a pretty good definition of religion. It's like having faith that the Monet on your wall is real based on lack of ability to prove it isn't.
Firewall everything (Score:3, Funny)
I firewall every app, including google apps on my phone using the free firewall NetGuard. I also have data turned off and data limits set to zero. I also keep my phone in airplane mode, although that would be impractical for most people. This assures that I am never tracked by google, our Nazi snooping government, etc.
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They also triangulate on cell towers.
Radio isn't magic. If the phone is in airplane mode, there is no secret juju at the cell towers that can track you.
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And make sure the shiny side is out!
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Re:Firewall everything (Score:5, Insightful)
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A phone is a location tracking device. It has to be in order for it to work with cellular networks.
That's why he said he keeps it in airplane mode all the time. As long as you don't turn WiFi on while in airplane mode, the cell system can't track you and you can't be tracked by the location of the WiFi router.
If you don't want people to track you, why do you carry one around with you?
Because it plays music and takes pictures. And there are times when I want to make calls.
Today's (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Today's (Score:4, Informative)
Simple answer: (Score:5, Insightful)
Shitty privacy laws from shitty paid-for public "servants". Anything else is a distraction from that issue.
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It's the lack of transparency as much as that. If we got a pop up every time an app used GPS or spied on us, people might decide to take umbrage with it.
But, most people just don't give a crap about things that happen when they can't see them because nothing happens if you're not looking. The result is that the rest of us have to be triply careful as those jackwagons sold us out as well as themselves.
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Shitty privacy laws from shitty paid-for public "servants".
And not likely to change anytime soon, what with both Facebook and Google getting so deep into politics and enthusiastically participating in the congressmen pay-to-own market. This, together with the informational services they provide to some various government agencies puts them in a strong position to stop inconvenient legislation. At this time I can't think of any opposing entity with enough clout or deep pockets to stop those behemoths from trampling all over our privacy.
Why is this Company Tracking You On Thanksgiving? (Score:2)
If you don't have the data, you can't scan it. But if you do, you can squeeze the data so hard that a 0 becomes a 1.
Re:Why is this Company Tracking You On Thanksgivin (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Anonymity does not mean you as an individual cannot be identified. It just means you haven't been - yet.
Excellent post, but I think you err on the side of too much optimism. Anonymity doesn't mean you haven't been identified yet; it means you have not been told you were identified yet.
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I'd like some more justification for "90-95% of the population will make up a unique (home,work) ZIP pair." (paraphrased)
If we assume the estimated 330M population of the US, and *around* 43k ZIP codes, that 76% of the population is adult, and the relatively crazy assumption that ALL of them are working, let's do some combinatorics...
Yes, there exists sufficient space in Binomial[43001,2] (Mathematica/Wolfram Alpha notation) to *permit* every adult to have a unique pair. The estimate gives 251M adults and a
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About the first google hit refers to the study. See https://books.google.com/books... [google.com]
I Just Stick My Phone In My Butt When I Sleep (Score:3)
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And I bet you set it on Vibrate first...
The Common Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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And another thing is, even if they truly intend to protect your privacy, never get hacked, never leak, and don't make any mistakes, they can still go bankrupt.
After bankruptcy, all that data is going to end up with the highest bidder, who won't have made any promises about how the data will be used.
And that first paragraph was a sort of unbelievably optimistic hope.
Call Mom (Score:4, Funny)
Anonymous means something else (Score:3)
Anonymous doesn't mean that I can't track you from your house to your work. It's that I don't know who you are when you get to either destinations. We build an incredible database of information about anonymous people, unfortunately with enough information we can often de-anonymise them.
Same with Bitcoin being anonymous. Just because I know exactly how much money is in your wallet and exactly where you spend it doesn't make it less anonymous.
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It can still be anonymous (Score:4, Interesting)
For example - The Canadian credit bureaus will sell reports based on postal code (a postal code is a side of a street, between intersections), that give the high, low and median score. Now if there were under a certain number of people in that postal code we didn't give the information (This was a decision made by the programmers, legally the company could) but what about the case where the high and the low score were almost the same? In such a case, revealing the high and the low essentially revealed everyone's score.
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If the data is say held by Google and they allow only certain aggregate queries to be done but never give you anything but the aggregate answer then Safegraph won't know what happened in individual houses.
Your hypothetical makes sense, but it doesn't appear to be the case. According to TFA, Safegraph doesn't get the data from Google or any similar source, they get it from many third-party apps, and they have to get full detail because they are the aggregator. They can take steps to anonymize it, of course.
Google (Score:2)
They just asked Google.
I am NOT in my favorite bar on Thanksgiving!! (Score:2)
Literally, not liberally (Score:2)
Anonymous = without names. Location, dates, homes, family connections, and times of day aren't names.
Congrats on shitty laws.
Good! (Score:2)
The answer to "Why" in one word (Score:2)
Money.
I can't help thinking (Score:1)
Anonymous (Score:2)