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It's gotta be a gold mine for stalkers, that's for sure. I don't necessarily want Joe Public to be able to do a SQL query and get back my day-to-day comings and
by mwfunk 11y ago
It's gotta be a gold mine for stalkers, that's for sure. I don't necessarily want Joe Public to be able to do a SQL query and get back my day-to-day comings and goings with intersections and timestamps and everything.
I'm normally in favor of public data being public, but in this specific case I think the potential for abuse (and the ease and extremity of that abuse) might outweigh the benefits of being this free and open about this particular data set.
- awqrre 11y agoI think that this data should always be public and then maybe tags will become a thing of the past.
- awqrre 11y agoI'm not sure why the down-votes but what I mean is that nowadays, with tag readers everywhere, I think we give up too much privacy by having a tag on the exterior of the vehicle. Steve Jobs never had a tag on his car as far as I know but this was in CA and he had to switch car every 6 months... I don't know if this is legal in any other states.
- bunderbunder 11y agoThey could have captured basically all the potential benefit of this dataset while more-or-less curtailing the potential for abuse with very little effort: Just give salted hashes of the license plate numbers rather than sharing them in the clear.
- x1798DE 11y agoWhy use a salted hash at all? Why not just randomly generated unique tokens? That said, even with randomly generated unique tokens, I suspect knowing where someone was at two or three specific times would be enough to deanonymize them.
- jacquesm 11y agoYou don't even have to know where. Given enough samples all you need to know is that they weren't in certain places (for instance, at home). Eventually the constraints will line up in such a way that only one car matches the pattern, and then you know all the other places and times too. A sort of reverse sodoku.
- morisy 11y agoEven if the hashes are salted, if you see XXXX ends up parking outside address 123 Hickory nightly, it's really easy to figured out who it is. It's incredibly hard to release this kind of data responsibly and safely.
- vijayr 11y agoSafely or not, what is the reasoning behind releasing this data to the public at all? What can we build with this data that is useful without violating anyone's privacy?