Lessons from NYC’s improperly anonymized taxi logs
Whoa, whoa.... You're telling me there's a public data set of <i>all taxi trip geolocation data with GPS precision</i>? That's f'ing insane!<p>I think there's a MUCH bigger privacy issue here than what the author focuses on.<p>Couldn't you deduce many <i>passenger</i> identities based on addresses? There's a lot of scenarios where passenger identities could be effectively de-anonymized, just based on GPS data. You could then use this data set to analyze their comings and goings.<p>1. For people who live alone in a single family home, you can pretty much completely track when and where they went by taxi. From this you can deduce a lot about their interests, lifestyle, workplace and schedule, private life, etc. It's profoundly invasive.<p>2. Even if there's a few people sharing an address, the other dropoff/pickup point can be used to narrow down the likelihood of who it is, especially when combined with other easily obtainable data.<p>For example if you knew an employee (e.g. that cute barista) lived in a certain neighborhood you could track their trips to/from work and deduce their home address.<p>Or if you knew there was only one senior citizen (or Muslim, etc.) living in a building, a regular trip to a senior center (or mosque) would reveal when their apartment is vacant.<p>Or if there's only one young man in a building, a single trip home from a gay bar could out them.<p>Holy shit.. can you imagine someone just plotting all the trips from a single gay bar? Listing off all the connected residential addresses? And not only that, <i>any subsequent trips home from those addresses the next morning</i>? Taking the walk of shame to a whole new level!<p>Likewise trips could be used to deduce affairs and other deceptions by fellow residents. "You said you were working late, but the only taxi trip to our building that night was from a bar."<p>This is just off the top of my head.. I feel I could go on for hours listing all the possible ways this data set could be exploited.<p>How is this not front page New York Times???