Mobilewalla used cellphone data to estimate the demographics of protesters
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
> Mobilewalla does not collect the data itself, but rather buys it from a variety of sources, including advertisers, data brokers, and internet service providers.
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
Most recently, this was heard in Georgia following the death of Rayshard Brooks, and a subsequent riot in which a Wendy's restaurant was burnt down. A cry went up about 'outside agitators' and suspicion fell on a woman pictured at the scene; it turned out she was the late Mr Brooks' girlfriend.
The data is aggregate data. It shows mostly males, in the 18-34 age bracket, mostly white.
The CEO whose surname is Datta. Quite appropos.
Very few services are immune from this. I learned recently that Airbnb (YC W09) actually sells your chat logs[2] and stay history(!) to data brokers, which can be used for stalking or kidnapping in the wrong hands.
Coinbase (YC S12) is also one of the companies that sells your activity log (including IP addresses and timestamps, which amounts to a location tracklog) to a third party without your explicit consent (other than creating a Coinbase account).
1: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vbp5/shady-data-brokers...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
What We Look for in Founders
4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
I mean, if I had a friend who openly claimed to be 'naughty' in this way, I'd start being very cautious around them.
By not following those assumptions (rules) you can make a new better model which might have better accuracy at representative real world problem than the existing model.
It doesn't mean that it's unethical or morally wrong. It doesn't have to be.
I find it weird to say good founders should 'delight in breaking rules', as that is a really consumer tech biased (and frankly, privileged teenage male) point of view, where external stakes are relatively low.
That attitude can be pretty counterproductive in a lot of important industries. It may be necessary to break certain rules to achieve a larger common good, but to bias toward breaking them (rather than to see it as simply sometimes necessary) represents one of tech's worse qualities, and probably does a lot to filter out a lot of potential founders.
Also take issue with the idea that successful founders are 'usually good people'. At least in my experience most are in the chaotic neutral camp where they generally don't care much about externalities as long as they're not too bad or seriously affect them, and their ideas about 'changing the world' are generally indistinguishable from their own personal success.
That's a pretty big misrepresentation of the NY Times article. From the article:
> Sift doesn’t sell or share any of the data it has with third parties.
Sift is a third party risk analysis provider. One of its big selling points is that it can correlate fraud signals across multiple data sets. So, essentially, companies that DON'T want to share data with each other can share data with sift and rely on it to provide aggregate results back. In this way it's the opposite of a data broker. Companies trust it to hold sensitive data they don't want to share.
There are a lot of reasons why any centralized fraud prevention service is concerning and I know that many companies, including Airbnb, limit their use of these signals for that reason. Truthfully, I think the dangers of such a service far outweigh their value and it simply shouldn't exist at all.
Regardless, it's quite different than selling your data to a data broker. If there were any indication that Sift were selling or sharing this data I guarantee they would get dropped instantly. If you believe that a company can't really care about its users' privacy (and you might be justified in that) just consider that sharing this data would be the same as sharing it with the fraudsters it ostensibly tries to stop. That would defeat the entire point of the service.
To a sibling poster, the premise of the NYT article is that Sift allowed end users to download their own data because of GDPR not in violation of it.
There are often threads on here criticizing Airbnb for allowing fraud on the platform and saying they do nothing to prevent it. Here we're criticizing them for sharing data with a centralized fraud system to gain signal on potential fraud.
I think this is the crux of the discussion about the surveillance state vs "defund the police". Algorithmic fraud detection is a frequently racist invasion of privacy. But fraud and crime are also both bad and tend to have a more significant impact on a company's brand / reputation than overreaching in terms of data collection and surveillance. So it's very important to hold them accountable for their use of data but let's not muddy the argument by misrepresenting what's happening.
I don’t want my booking site disclosing my location to others who may use it to harm me, full stop. I have no idea what internal controls, if any, Sift or any other service provider has in place to screen their own staff or their own data handling procedures for safety. Even Equifax didn’t get this stuff right.
If I am telling a vendor where I sleep and when I am sleeping there, it is a huge breach of my privacy and safety for them to tell third parties without my explicit consent. This includes even relatively innocuous stuff, like database hosting. One disgruntled employee and a .torrent file later and many people’s lives or safety are put at risk.
I also wish Gene Hackman had become a CRISPR scientist, not an actor.
Some aggregator third-party add-on library integrated into other apps snarfing up data is a bit different and more concerning, though thankfully it's the specific sort of thing GDPR and CCPA were designed against.
No. MobileWalla's statement in the article:
"African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,” Mobilewalla claimed. “Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%). "
All it means is that among African American blacks, males were the majority.
The key is:
""African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,”"
vs. females (when looking at male-female distribution in the African American pop of protesters, in those four cities the majority were men).
This is very clear. No idea what you are talking about.
A substantial majority of the protesters were white, in the cities where the data was gathered, with the highest percentage in Minneapolis (85%), followed by Los Angeles (78%), and Atlanta and New York (both at 76%). A total of 18% of the protesters were African American in Atlanta, 11% in Minneapolis, 13% in New York and 3% in Los Angeles. Those numbers remained steady during the nighttime hours. Hispanic and Asian American participation was less than 10% in all four cities.
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
Again, nothing you say here can be found at the URL you provided. In fact the words "male", "female" and even "%" do not exist at that URL.
>"Ethnicity Distribution: A substantial majority of the protesters were white, in the cities where the data was gathered, with the highest percentage in Minneapolis (85%), followed by Los Angeles (78%), and Atlanta and New York (both at 76%). A total of 18% of the protesters were African American in Atlanta, 11% in Minneapolis, 13% in New York and 3% in Los Angeles. Those numbers remained steady during the nighttime hours. Hispanic and Asian American participation was less than 10% in all four cities.
Male vs. Female During the daytime hours, the majority of Black Lives Matter protesters were male in Atlanta (58%), Minneapolis (56%) and New York (62%). However, in Los Angeles, the greatest number of protesters during daytime were women. At nighttime, the percentage of male protesters increased in all four cities.
African American Males vs. Females African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females. Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%). There was no statistical change for the nighttime hours.
How Old Were the Protesters? The overall age of the protesters in all four cities skewed heavily in the 18-34 age ranging from 66% in New York and L.A., 67% in Minneapolis to 69% in Atlanta. Protesters in the 55+ age group ranked second ranging from 24% in New York, 23% in Atlanta and Minneapolis to 20% in Los Angeles."
I think the source is a little bit clearer.
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
has no data and no clarification.
I don't know what's up with their website. The link redirect to a page about covid-19 as of now (https://www.mobilewalla.com/blog/fighting-covid-19-with-loca...
Same: no data and no clarification at that URL.
Bing cache: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mobilewa...
https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/4309344/MW%20Protes...
The protests appear to have been all been majority (70%+) white, assuming we believe this report. This seems to indicate that some of the wording they used in the text is incredibly confusing.
Probably not the best defense to be made when people are concerned that this technology is being used to suppress and monitor protestors...
Look on their web pages:
"Why Partner with Mobilewalla? Our partners are always looking for rich, comprehensive data and profiles to provide to their clients. Likewise, Mobilewalla is always looking to increase the quality of our data through partnerships with companies like Oracle Data Cloud.
Mobilewalla provides brands from any vertical or industry with the insights and long-term needs to personalize, target, and scale their marketing initiatives - from basic demographics like gender, location, and device type, to highly nuanced and detailed profiles...Mobilewalla provides insights into customer behaviors as they exist in the real world, all based on mobile-app usage and location-based intelligence."
I don't even go to protests, but this is in the news all the time. E.g. the surveillance tactics the government used to break up the Dakota Access Pipeline protests was a major news story around the entire world.
If that worked then presumably Snowden would just do that instead of turning his phone off, taking out the battery, and putting it in the refrigerator.
Do you believe >300M Americans already have malware on their phones which runs when they hit Airplane mode, and tricks them in to believing all radios are off, when it is in fact still pinging NSA servers with telemetry data?
I don't. Such technology surely exists, but it is not massively deployed, because doing so would spoil its usefulness. Basically, "We're not that important."
They didn’t announce new hardware that could do this. It’s available in every new iPhone. This is proof that this capability (to run software even when the phone is “off”) has been around at least for a number of years. It’s not a huge leap to imagine that some malware could rewrite the firmware and enable e.g. microphone listening when the phone is off.
As far as the camera, the country is awash in old cell phones. If your goal is documentation (as opposed to immediate Twitter posts), it is far better than using the one with a phone number.
But there have been many cases of cops forcing or attempting to force phone unlocks, and more where they coerce unlocking by lying about the law. Which is perfectly legal - the cliche about cops being being paid to lie is perfectly accurate, if not a full explication of their duties.
Feelings of safety are pretty individual. Apps that access personal data of importance don't live on my phone that leaves the house.
In all of those cities that's lower than the percentage of black people in the general population, so black people were underrepresented. But they were much more underrepresented in Los Angeles and Atlanta than in Minneapolis or New York.
Here's a table. First column is percent among protestors. Second is percent among general population. Third is first column as a percent of second column.
18 52 35 Atlanta
3 11 27 Los Angeles
11 19 58 Minneapolis
14 24 58 New York City
I wonder if there is some factor, especially in Los Angeles and Atlanta, that discouraged black people from wanting to attend or some hardship to attending that disproportionately fell on black people?
But of course "abolish the police" means a lot of different things to different people. I'm sure there are people that want literally no police but I'm also sure they are a minority.
That's kinda the problem we have today. We turn complex conversations and topics into their most extreme forms and so we can actually discuss them. And we presume the other person has an extreme view that opposes ours but we ourselves are smarter and now nuanced than the person we're "discussing" with. There's lots of examples. For example here we're discussing "should police exist" instead of "what should police be doing" and often people are even divided on the topic because "police stop bad guys" and "police are to serve the community and uphold the social contract."
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hflutt/rei...
sort of just depends on who you ask.
I have people within my social circle that want to literally abolish the police -- erase the concept entirely -- citing historical examples groups of people that had no such similar concept as a central policing group.
Because of fringe opinions like that I tend to take care when I read or say things like "'X' means this", because that's the power of language, some folks really do mean abolish the police, while some simply use such language with a somewhat 'hyperbolic' or satirical meaning.
I get the impression that the minority of protesters who started using the slogan "Defund the Police" meant "Defund the police." But then there were a number of people who were sympathetic to these protesters but also realized that getting rid of the police is a very extreme position, and they started rationalizing things by saying that the protesters _really_ meant something else ("When people say "Defund the Police" what they actually man is..."). Even when the people themselves keep saying, "No, we really mean get rid of the police."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
There's a difference between a slogan and a program. Somehow accuracy and correctness in slogans are only demanded when someone doesn't agree with the basic premise of the program.
... transitive verb
a: to kill with hunger
b: to deprive of nourishment
c: to cause to capitulate by or as if by depriving of nourishment
At least not a very good sign.
I said in another comment, communication has 3 components: what is said, what was meant, and what was heard. We have to recognize that these are 3 different things and frequently all 3 are different. Communication is extremely difficult. So try to say what you mean and try to hear what was meant. (obviously this is a saying and in of itself is limited and should be taken more as a baseline idea rather than a literal and absolute point to stand on)
>> But of course "abolish the police" means a lot of different things to different people. I'm sure there are people that want literally no police but I'm also sure they are a minority.
I'm under the opinion that you actually __AGREE__ with me considering
> Because of fringe opinions like that
If we presume "fringe" and "minority" hold similar meanings here.
> that's the power of language, some folks really do mean abolish the police, while some simply use such language with a somewhat 'hyperbolic' or satirical meaning.
This is what I'm driving at, except I want to change it up a bit
> that's the power of language, a few folks really do mean abolish the police, while most simply use such language with a somewhat 'hyperbolic' or satirical meaning.
We're discussing the power of language, so I think the distinction here is important. The fact that we're having this conversation was kinda my point. We're arguing over what people mean instead of arguing over what should be done. We're letting fringe/minority voices represent the majority opinions. This distracts us from the nuances and complicated discussions that we need to be having. I am claiming that the way these topics are being represented is itself a major issue, because of the power of language. We are being primed to view others opinions in ways that do not represent them. All that causes us to do is fight and never have the true discussion.
You can always find someone that has "X" position. The problem is that when you represent group "Y" with position "X" when "Y" doesn't hold that position. It is a problem that we have to discuss this before we discuss what needs to be done. I personally am deeply frustrated by this.
So I will ask: "What led to you responding to me in this way? What part was I unclear about?" Because to me it is clear, but given your response it is apparent that I wasn't.
EDIT: To the downvoters, I am honestly trying to get feedback into how I can better convey the message. Would you mind also leaving a comment along with the downvote? That way I can understand?
But beyond that, I've always felt that the attitude of "this is a lot of money, therefore we should cut it" to be a poor way of approaching things. We should allocate funds based on whether or not the return we get is worth it, not based on whether or not the number we invest sounds big. Cutting specific things that are unnecessary or saving money by making things more efficient seem like a good idea, but cutting budgets just to say that you're cutting budgets doesn't.
[1] https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/Doma...
> I've always felt that the attitude of "this is a lot of money, therefore we should cut it" to be a poor way of approaching things. We should allocate funds based on whether or not the return we get is worth it
The difference is I think: "When we're scrutinizing budgets we should look at the largest ones first." Which would be a pretty logical way to investigate.
So pretty much we're in agreement.
"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
It's unfortunate, but I will not start interpreting language "less accurately". I'll continue to agree that we need change, but I'm still more happy than unhappy with the basic existence of law enforcement.
> It's unfortunate, but I will not start interpreting language "less accurately".
But, in this case, the literal interpretation is the "less accurate" one. Literal != accurate.
Do you feel the same way about "Starve the beast"?[1] Surely you understand the difference between a slogan and a program?
Additionally, analogies, slogans, sayings, and such are all simplified and reduced methods intended to prime a person to remember or think of a more complicated topic. Here "defund/abolish the police" is an easy to remember/say slogan (and can be easily written down and read from afar). It is much harder to communicate "we need to rethink policing in general, their funding, and what they should be doing. Currently we do not know the answer but are trying to drive a national discussion so that we can come to an agreement and fix what a large portion of us believe is a problem." The latter is much more vague and is trying to bring together people with wildly different opinions but do agree with that main point.
Reading __ANY__ slogan as an absolute and/or literal meaning is simply naive. It's hard enough to communicate accurately with the roughly 300 words in this comment, let alone slogans, which need to be smaller than a tweet.
I never claimed that anyone can make up their own definitions, only that setting the bar at “literal meaning” is unrealistic, as that’s not how language actually works.
See: catching a bus by the skin of your teeth so that you and your friends can have a night out and paint the town red.
Chances are you understood exactly what I meant, but taken literally that sentence is utter jibberish.
In communication as the recipient your job is to try to understand what is meant, not what is said.
Conversely, as the communicator, your job is to say what you mean, and ensure what is said is in line with what is meant. The added complexity is that to do this you need to have a decent grasp on what recipients will hear (as in "understand intent," as opposed to the literal words that they physically hear)
Or, actually listen to people. Your call.
The slogan makes many people think you're advocating an unreasonable idea that you're not actually advocating. Do you think that makes for a good slogan?
Edit: I apologize. I missed where you said it's a bad slogan, and took your defense of it as implying it's good.
The same ones you use to understand what the word "police" means. Human language isn't a direct, thought transmission mechanism (especially with short utterances). Ambiguity and uncertainty and reliance on shared context are inherent. The artificial language Toki Pona gives an exaggerated demonstration of this [1].
> The slogan makes many people think you're advocating an unreasonable idea that you're not actually advocating. Do you think that makes for a good slogan?
No one can ever cram the nuance of a complex political position onto a slogan to fit on a sign. Inevitably someone will misunderstand to some degree, then have to go on to read one of the hundreds of articles titled "what does 'defund the police' mean?" to correct your misunderstanding.
If you're searching for some optimal slogan, you're not going to find it. Sure there are alternatives, but a couple things count in "defund the police"'s favor: 1) it succinctly indicates the topic and 2) pretty clearly conveys the opinion that a radical break with prior reform efforts is needed. "Abolish the police" does the same, except it's more amplified.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/abolish?...
1) "Abolish the police" = To end the police officially --- Defund = to stop providing the money to pay for something
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/defund?q...
2) "Defund the police" = To stop providing the money for police --- Reform = to make an improvement, especially by changing a person's behaviour or the structure of something.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/reform?q...
3) "Reform the police" = To improve the police by changing its behavior/structure --- The meaning of these sentences is very clear and is not open to discussion.
My opinion: 1) is simply anarchic and unrealistic in any form of civilization. 2) is similar to 1), but might suggested perhaps a privately funded police instead of publicly funded? (a whole can of worms there) 3) is the most realistic and practical option and seems to me to be what most people mean and what states are doing. It's not the most dramatic and "attractive" thing to write on a poster though...
There are many more views and opinions of course, these are just my takes in 10m of writing and thinking.
Regardless, attempts to make this into an oversimplified binarily sided discussion reveal, IMHO, a lack of reading and comprehension ability or an agenda that is alternative to understanding and resolving these issues as a collaborative democratic society.
But language __ISN'T__ precise and that's why we are required to understand one another in "good faith." I've said in many comments that communication has 3 parts: what is meant, what is said, and what is heard. Dr. Suss and Lewis Carol exemplify this in their literature.
Not only that, but definitions of words are constantly changing. A dictionary always lags behind the true definition. After all, any linguist will tell you that words only mean what a society agrees that they mean (note the difference between "a society" vs "the speakers of that language"). We see this quite frequently. An perfect example is "capitalism" and "socialism," if you're go to is the dictionary then you're probably extremely frustrated with how most everyone uses these terms and will notice that different groups use the same words to mean completely different things!
Language really is a mess.
> Regardless, attempts to make this into an oversimplified binarily sided discussion reveal, IMHO, a lack of reading and comprehension ability or an agenda that is alternative to understanding and resolving these issues as a collaborative democratic society.
This, I completely agree with. But the reason this is "a lack of reading and comprehension" is because "comprehension" is the acknowledgement that language is of itself imprecise and that your job as a reader is the read what was meant, and not what was said.
Agreed, good faith is definitely required in a healthy debate, and I quite liked those comments and communication model. I'll be looking through those references in future, thanks!
And yes language is a mess, however, just because language is not a perfect construct or even as good as we expected it to be, I don't think we should relativize too much and put too much of the onus of the discussion on the reader. (like I've seen in threads here, some could rationalize away some words like "Abolish ~= Reform, so I'll just join this side of the protest, I'm sure that's what they meant... despite the pitchforks and torches...")
In a healthy discussion I think it is as much of the sender's (speaker, writer) job to make sure he is understood as is the receiver's (listener, reader) job to make sure he understands. Awareness of such models as the ones you referred would already be quite good for most discussions. Although I suspect on most media we end up seeing two people having concurrent ideological monologues rather than a discussion with intentful listening and non-manipulative speaking...
Specifically for "Abolish VS Defund VS Reform", I think we can do better and I don't think those 3 words really differ that much between dictionary and everyday language, and if I'm wrong and they do differ, the issue still remains, do we remove the system entirely, change its resources or change its behavior.
> ...any linguist will tell you that words only mean what a society agrees that they mean (note the difference between "a society" vs "the speakers of that language"). We see this quite frequently. An perfect example is "capitalism" and "socialism," if you're go to is the dictionary then you're probably extremely frustrated with how most everyone uses these terms and will notice that different groups use the same words to mean completely different things!
BTW, another couple of perfect examples: "fact" and "literally"...
As an outsider watching all this going on, it seems the last thing anyone seems to want is a discussion; you're either on board or a racist. It's all very odd.
No, it means abolish the police (the centralized, monolithic, paramilitary local law enforcement agencies.)
It also means to reorganize the law enforcement function within local government, and probably reduce the distribution of resources devoted to armed law enforcement. But just reorganize/reduce funding is the “defund” not “abolish” position, which are related but distinct viewpoints.
I interacted with the police exactly 3 times in 20 years I lived in my neighborhood. Once I got a ticket for the missing front license plate on my car (deservedly so, paid the fine). Once my mailbox was broken into, and a police officer stopped by to ask questions and see if I'd press charges if they found the thief (of course I would, but they never found the guy), and once I had to call police on a neighbor who thought it'd be a wonderful idea to blast music at full volume at 2AM in the middle of the work week. That's the extent of it. There's no crime in my neighborhood, violent or otherwise, by any meaningful metric. If I thought all neighborhoods were like this, of course I'd be in favor of simultaneously defunding police and abolishing the second amendment.
Having seen total lawlessness first hand during the "wild 90's" in Russia, I don't have such illusions. I once saw a dude on his knees with a gun pointed at his forehead within 200m of the Red Square, with police officers watching but not intervening in the proceedings, probably because the mobster with the gun was above their pay grade. Don't know if the guy got shot or not, I couldn't do anything anyway, so I entered the nearby subway station and went home, but the image seared into my mind. Remember, this was in the very center of a large city. You can imagine what kinds of crazy shit went on on the outskirts.
People in South Chicago or in the bad parts of NY have no such illusions either. That's why I support _gradual_ police reform and increased funding (you can't, as a rule, get better service by paying less), have a safe full of guns and ammo, and will vote strenuously against any politician, irrespective of party affiliation or just about any other views, who tries to "defund" the police or restrict 2A. I fail to see how such measures would be in anyone's longer term interest.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21276824/defund-police-divest-e...
However, just like the author of the article, I agree that we would need to see a similar poll now after the George Floyd protests to see if the opinion still stands, but it's important to note.
A plurality of African Americans (38-31) oppose cutting police budgets. African Americans are split 50-50 in whether we need more or fewer police on the streets. A supermajority (64-33) believe that the current police departments can be reformed.
A majority (51-17) support spending less on police and increasing funding for social programs, but try to reconcile this with the statistic above, where half want more police on the streets. (People might perceive this question as reduced budgets would hit management, etc., rather than beat cops).
Do you have a better poll that shows different numbers?
It depends upon what more policing means. I have been keeping a closer eye on what's happening in Canada, and it seems clear that the police are not trained or do not internalize training to handle certain situations particularly well. In extreme cases, this has resulted in situations being escalated and deadly force being used. Given complaints ranging from excessive force to racial profiling, it sounds like problem routinely plays itself out on a smaller scale. If a community is reluctant to trust the police, I doubt that they will see benefits from more traditional policing.
Some of the de-funding discussion has been about reducing police funding to allocate it to other social services, but I suppose that it could also be reallocated training officers who's primary purpose is community relations, responding to mental health issues, or handling criminal activity that is unlikely to require an armed response. This may make more sense than dumping responsibility onto social service agencies both due to the quality of training and the ability to immediately access police resources if escalation is inescapable.
And for the record, I am squarely in the defund camp, but also open minded to discussion.
From the article "It’s unclear how accurate Mobilewalla’s analysis actually is"
> Datta told BuzzFeed News that his company, on average, has access to location data for 30% to 60% of people in any given location in the United States.
And getting down to it more: which 30-60% of people? I find it odd that when HN is talking about Covid they are so keen on finding the slightest bias in data/report and arguing over that, yet in posts like this most of the comments presume accuracy. I would expect the same scrutiny (which I think is good!) everywhere.
I'd like to refer you to the sentence after I quoted the article.
>> And getting down to it more: which 30-60% of people?
Polling works hard to ensure that their data set is a representative demographic. We don't know that here. Considering that there are socioeconomic correlations between race, it isn't out of the question that this data is not representative. You could have 60% but if your data set isn't representative, you aren't going to draw accurate conclusions.
Also, for a place like LA, there are systemic factors of poverty and homelessness in their Black populations that might make something like ownership of a permanent mobile number less likely [1].
Regardless, this practice of data harvesting should be illegal.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-13/column-a...
It's hard to know what kind of biases are in this data without access to it.
Protests also have the risk of being wrongfully arrested or injured and not being able to get to work the next day.
Perhaps, like, a racist police force?
Edit: On reflection, maybe the downvote was more about the tone that it was presented in?
> "African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females"
Then follows pie charts showing Caucasians outnumbered African-Americans 6:1.
It looks like what they meant was 'among African-American protesters, the majority were male'.
(I don't understand how they choose the colors.)
That said it looks like males dominated most of the charts in most cities cited.
There are hundreds of reasons for not bringing a smartphone, not only the abuse of companies like Mobilewalla. Imagine if you happen to be close to a storefront that is vandalized or a statue that is brought down - cellphone data will make you a terrorist suspect! (At least in the current US).
But that was the stated justification. The real purpose of the report is to advertise what Mobilewalla does. I consider this a form of profiteering.
Which is just a piece of paper. It has absolutely no power to protect you. Only a government that respects it can do that, and it's a certainty that our government will, from time to time, completely disregard that document when it feels the need to.
People have good rational reasons for hiding all sorts of legal activities they participate in.
To put it another way: you can't rely on the Constitution to protect you during a protest against violations of the Constitution.
Or imagine a left wing authoritarian government targeting lockdown protestors.
We should all be concerned about wanton data collection.
So we can mobilise to use this data for profiling protestors, but not to help tackle a pandemic which is spreading concurrently?
https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/re....
Thank you for the correction
What I'm not ok with, is them selling my data, combining it with cellphone data, netflix viewing data, creditcard data, magazine subscriptions, email subscriptions, and many others, and building personal profiles that governments, political organizations, and commercial enterprises I don't have a direct relationship with to abuse.
I don't think it is a slippery-slope from from the more narrow, single-firm use case to the broad-profile-being abused. GDPR and similar regulation is one way we can get there. We are going to need probably another generation of people and laws to figure out the right regulatory norms and frameworks, but it seems like a tractable problem.
Netflix, apple, etc don't sell data. There is no such thing as building a 'personal profile' by combining data from all these different sources. Data is licensed in aggregate, and typically anything under 1,000 user ids can't be used. Unless your bringing in data yourself, you can't build profiles on individuals.
I 100% agree that we need major privacy regulation, but the first step in that is putting in effort to actually understand and discuss the facts.
You are correct that the reputable companies I used in my strawman apply practices like this. But it is certainly not the case that this is universal. I've worked professionally with all sorts of a data brokers (for anti-abuse/fraud purposes) and there are many who deal with non-anonymized datasets, especially if we are talking about firms that evolved out the direct-marketing space. Further, there are many ways to make use of semi-anonymized data that while, not strictly joining private information, are able to perform profile appends and data imputation in ways that allow for inferences many would consider privacy violations regardless of the fact the technical construction methods don't directly access specific profiles and are at some level stochastic.
But all that was besides my point, which was perhaps lost with a bad example. HN readers can be both FOR increased use of customer data for acute purposes and AGAINST broader abuses of such data without being hypocritical. There is a relevant distinction to be drawn.
I do think that what smaller players is doing is the thing people thing of as obviously immoral, but those practices get pinned on everyone else.
They 100% do not sell names, addresses, or any personally identifiable information because that’s super illegal.
And "hacker news thinks collecting demographic data is a bad thing" is uncharitably broad.
But also I think you'll find that some of the same people in this thread also complain about Google analytics. My personal website, for example, does not use Google analytics.
The anonymization is a joke, they had fixed IDs over I think a 30 day window.
Airsage should be shut down and C-levels to the board should be jailed for wire tapping.
At this point I don’t think it’s government so much as private companies I’m concerned about.
Candidates silently get ignored depending on what this kind of data shows.
Also, is there any way to prevent Google from tracking the location of my Android phone short of uninstalling Android?
Is airplane mode or turning your phone off effective? I've heard stated before that they are not, but I don't understand the technical details.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hu...
> Also, is there any way to prevent Google from tracking the location of my Android phone short of uninstalling Android?
Good question.
Basically use somebody else's maps, at the extreme end you can opt out of find my phone, and just don't manually use any Google services at all.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronav...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/minnesota-corona...
edit: Also, Texas had a Phase 3 reopening on June 3, which is around the time of peak protest: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-ph...
That said, social distancing during protests, being outdoors, how many people had active infections (this varies wildly across the US), mask use, actions (positive and negative) by the police, and living situations of the protesters (alone in an apartment or four roommates) all have an effect.
20% antibodies means that you could have an R = 1.25 and still get an effective R < 1.0, preventing further onwards transmission. R0 estimates for COVID-19 ranged from 2.5-6, so by itself 20% of the population with antibodies wouldn't do anything (it'd reduce R to 2-4.8, which is still pretty quick exponential spread, faster than the flu). However, R in the U.S. around the time of the protests was measured at about 1.07, because it wasn't fully opened up yet and many people are staying home out of fear. Under those conditions NYC gets an effective R = 0.85 (epidemic dies out), while a state with 2% antibodies has an effective R = 1.05, which is still positive (albeit slow) exponential spread.
I suspect it's a combination of the lax social distancing requirements + lack of immunity. NYC would still be experiencing exponential spread without existing immunity, but it's only because they're still locked down that the level of immunity they have can prevent an epidemic.
Not saying protests couldn't / don't have an effect. Saying that if we want to determine the root cause of the dramatic rise of Covid-19 in Texas, let's be logical about it.
[EDIT: Instead of calling Texas's decisions stupid, I changed my language to "un-wise", in the interests of precision.]
[1] https://www.twincities.com/2020/06/12/mn-coronavirus-george-...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/minnesota-sees-rise-covid-19-cases...
[3] https://komonews.com/news/local/fewer-than-1-of-seattle-prot...
It is so trivially easy to decipher a person's life from their location data, especially with some simple ML.
The fact that it's so easy ensures in my mind that it's only a matter of time before this data falls into the hands of a true authoritarian administration.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23138828
Basically, cell service providers collect as much data as possible and share it with as many third parties as possible. They keep track of your internet traffic, and they can keep track of your location based upon signal strength.
This is just one of the sources they get their data from, but there’s no way to stop it, short of removing your SIM card.
An easy one is to provide a mobile hotspot with the name `attwifi` with no password and just sniff the data. You can derive a lot of data just from the network activity on a phone and since you're on WiFi, you can get approximate WiFi location. A couple of dozen laptops in a couple of buildings and you can also approximate the direction the phones moved as they go from device to device.
FFS, my camera application wants to talk to the internet, sometimes when I'm NOT using it!
They mainly position themselves as local deals apps (find the best restaurant, get a coupon from nearby store) and fitness apps (rewards for walking, running, etc.)
Both use cases call for always-on location sharing.
I am fairly confident they can easily tell which way someone leans on the matter.
While often people are surprised at the tracking that's happened, usually as a result of 'fine print' they've clicked-through at some point, this is a young, activist & heavy-mobile-using population. Many will know or suspect tracking is happening. The more privacy-oriented organizers often inform participants of such considerations.
Those affected have probably consciously enabled many kinds of 'location sharing' options & location-sensitive apps – and then specifically used those features to share updates/photos, with explicit location disclosure, from the protest site. Many may have a generationally blasé attitude about the inevitability of such tracking.
Some may even be happy that "I'm being counted". There's always controversy after mass actions as to the actual number of participants, or how many truly represent a certain local community, with biased estimates from those with agendas. A possible silver-lining of technological tracking, if the potential abuse for persecuting individuals can be prevented, is that it can turn mass actions into more-accurately-measured "super-petitions", reflecting both viewpoint & intensity-of-commitment, for change.
It also seems to imply that the data is 100% accurate. And that is also wrong based on what I see.
I always "knew" that mass data is evaluated for many things, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. That book - besides being an excellent reference for anyone responsible for protecting data - is unsettling in showing the depth of the market and how it works. The topic headline doesn't even scratch the surface.
Collection methodology: Mobilewalla harnesses location and behavior-based data to understand consumers and recognize where individuals are in their life journey based on two years of historical data. User information is collected from a variety of sources so advertisers can engage consumers who are ready to buy and develop compelling advertising campaigns that speak directly to their best customers.
One of the reasons to have 'Non cellular network mobile Internet'[1] via long range hotspots where we could use standard techniques we use to protect ourselves from the ISP.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/51-non-cellular-network-mobile-...
Companies are now promoting data services to advertisers that allow a company to install a cookie on their website and, by just having a user complete a site visit, match an IP address to a physical mailing address with claimed 90% + accuracy.
Don't believe me? Check out this company: https://www.eltoro.com/
One of many companies that have recently popped up offering just such a service.
New technology adds new ways to protest and counter-protest. Cell phones have brought us mass-tracking and flash-mobs.
Yes, yes it is.
Those handling data like this, from whatever source, need much tighter regulation, since they are unable to regulate themselves.
The stat this refers to is gender ratio /amongst Black protestors only/; the overall racial mix of the protests really wasn't much different from their observed daytime (ie, control) racial mix.
FWIW, they also observe the same in-city out-of-city breakdown during the day and night, indicating that the 'bussed in protestor' fantasies of the right wing conspiracy machine were baseless. (though, really, that was pretty obvious anyway, and the tin-foil hats won't be convinced by any kind of evidence...)
Every any kind of activist should know online privacy 101 and use burner phone/sim.
what's the harm?
(and if you're in the US, it gets worse. When I lived in California, I asked my letter carrier if I could put a "no junk mail please" sign on the box like we do here. I was told to please not call it junk mail, but "bulk mail", as it provides a significant fraction of their funding.)
Anyone up for a game of 35 questions?
Edit: https://www.msp-pgh.com/history-direct-mail-marketing/
> The American Anti-Slavery Society printed and mailed marketing materials to religious and civic leaders in the south in 1835. This is likely the first direct mail campaign. They created a mailing list from names in newspapers and city directories, among other public lists.
the poorly-targeted campaign was not well-received: https://postalmuseum.si.edu/node/1912
Agitation is the first stage of a physical revolution.
No, I'm not being hyperbolic... history repeats itself