4 ms·

Any identifier that can be deemed to identify a person or household is covered. This means IP address, tokens, uuid's, etc. * IANAL

frenchyatwork 7y ago
Are there no zip codes in rural areas that are specific to a household?
- rubyfan 7y ago
  Zip5 codes are allocated by geography and population. See very large rural tracts of land in AZ or NM that have a large zip5 code area. Zip-9 probably could be associated with one household. Zips are actually a pain in the ass for purposes other than mail delivery because they change from time to time, are not cleanly allocated to geography or logical features on a map. They can be discontinuous and overlapping. Many companies employee proprietary means of assigning geographic identifiers that are not dependent on zip, population size or anything other than geo. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
  - tzs 7y ago
    To get a rough idea of how often a ZIP-9 narrows things down to a single street address, I took a look at the sales tax rate and boundary files made available for states that are in the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement [1]. 12 of those states, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington, use address-based tax rates. (The other 12 either just have one rate for the whole state, or just go by ZIP). For each ZIP-9 in the address files for the 12 address-based states, I found the lowest and the highest street number for that ZIP-9. I then counted how many of the ZIP-9s had the lowest street number the same as the highest street number. There were a total of 9,311,327 distinct ZIP-9 values. 2,415,305 of them had a low to high range that only included one number. That's about 26% of the ZIP-9's having a unique street number. Note that this does not necessarily mean a single household, because I'm not looking at the full address. Apartment buildings, for instance, will in many cases show up in that 26%. [1] https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/Shared-Pages/rate-and-boundary-files https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/Shared-Pages/rate-and-bo...
    - rubyfan 7y ago
      Excellent analysis. That’s like 2% or less of households in the US? So even at the Zip9 level not ideal for identifying specific households but problematic if you’re one of those 2M Zip9s.
jimktrains2 7y ago
So, if I were to make this request behind Carrier grade Nat no one from that provider can be tracked? Conversely, if my DHCP lease renewal I can be tracked?

frenchyatwork 7y ago

Are there no zip codes in rural areas that are specific to a household?

rubyfan 7y ago
Zip5 codes are allocated by geography and population. See very large rural tracts of land in AZ or NM that have a large zip5 code area. Zip-9 probably could be associated with one household. Zips are actually a pain in the ass for purposes other than mail delivery because they change from time to time, are not cleanly allocated to geography or logical features on a map. They can be discontinuous and overlapping. Many companies employee proprietary means of assigning geographic identifiers that are not dependent on zip, population size or anything other than geo. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
- tzs 7y ago
  To get a rough idea of how often a ZIP-9 narrows things down to a single street address, I took a look at the sales tax rate and boundary files made available for states that are in the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement [1]. 12 of those states, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington, use address-based tax rates. (The other 12 either just have one rate for the whole state, or just go by ZIP). For each ZIP-9 in the address files for the 12 address-based states, I found the lowest and the highest street number for that ZIP-9. I then counted how many of the ZIP-9s had the lowest street number the same as the highest street number. There were a total of 9,311,327 distinct ZIP-9 values. 2,415,305 of them had a low to high range that only included one number. That's about 26% of the ZIP-9's having a unique street number. Note that this does not necessarily mean a single household, because I'm not looking at the full address. Apartment buildings, for instance, will in many cases show up in that 26%. [1] https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/Shared-Pages/rate-and-boundary-files https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/Shared-Pages/rate-and-bo...
  - rubyfan 7y ago
    Excellent analysis. That’s like 2% or less of households in the US? So even at the Zip9 level not ideal for identifying specific households but problematic if you’re one of those 2M Zip9s.

jimktrains2 7y ago

So, if I were to make this request behind Carrier grade Nat no one from that provider can be tracked? Conversely, if my DHCP lease renewal I can be tracked?