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Comment by cptcobalt | Hacker News Reader

> your car’s movements and exact location are being collected and shared anonymously with a data broker

> said that the company had gotten the precise location of about 10 million G.M. cars up to every one to three seconds, but that the data did not include identifying details about the driver.

The word "Anonymously" means exactly nothing here. If one's exact location and movements are collected, wouldn't that include a lot of time and datapoints where the car is spending time at work and home locations?

Seems incredibly trivial at that point to deanonymize usage.

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A long time ago, I read an article about a journalist that did just that: bought a pack of “anonymized” location data set, then promptly tracked and interviewed one of the people in said data set.

It kills me that I can’t remember where the article was exactly, because it’s one of mu favorite examples of why fighting indiscriminate tracking is important. I remember it being from a Scandinavian newspaper, maybe Dannish?

It may be the same article, I'm not sure, but I remember reading something similar where researchers also showed that the more anonymized the data, the less useful (and thus valuable) it becomes. Maybe there's a balance to be found but, ultimately, it seems like "anonymized" is a pipe dream.

Could it be this Norwegian one from NRK?

https://nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/my-phone-was-spying-on-me-so-i...

The original in Norwegian https://www.nrk.no/norge/xl/avslort-av-mobilen-1.14911685 has some nice visualizations.

I think this could be it, thanks!

Probably this NYT article on de-anonymized phone data?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

One of the worst (best?) examples I remember was the Web of Trust extension in 2016. The company claimed it was selling anonymized user data but it was actually leaking information through recorded URLs about all sorts of private things like account names, addresses, ongoing legal investigations, etc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT_Services#Sale_of_user-rela...

Oh crap, I remember using that back in the day.

Re-identification is an active area of study, with experts in the field not believing full anonymity is really actually possible.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/23/134090/youre-ver...

One of the oldest (AFAIK) occurrences of this was AOL releasing a data set of "anonymized" search queries in 2006 and it took a about a day for the first person to be deanonymized.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html

https://techcrunch.com/2006/08/09/first-person-identified-fr...

It is. There's no way this is 'private' vs. a kinda motivated amateur who can be bothered downloading a copy of the phone book, let alone vs. any parties who actually stand to benefit materially from knowing this stuff.

I've often thought that cynically, the real motivation for having non-technical people in these public-facing roles (sales, marketing, media etc.) is so that they can honestly, earnestly, present their understanding of the product. An understanding, that is, which lacks the nuance to properly convey the implications of pretty much any aspect of the situation.

Process of elimination, contrasting and comparing, and trivial methodologies can be used when you have enough data to compare, and any sort of real world unmasked data to anchor to.

AI and data processing algorithms can do more advanced things, like stylometric comparisons, biometrics, and doing the grunt work of filtering out data associated with a particular individual. You're known and modeled with higher resolution and greater detail than any intimate partner or therapist.

No problem here! This will certainly not end poorly. There's absolutely nothing that could go wrong.

Yes. This problem is why I cringe a bit any time I see someone claiming that people should feel safer because their data is being "anonymized".

It is possible to do data collection in a relatively anonymous way (it's never possible to do it in an entirely anonymous way), but there's no way for a person outside the company to know if it's actually being done that way, and there still has to be an entity somewhere that processes the non-anonymous form of the data.

Exactly. This only remains private if the data is aggregated to show total/average number of cars at any given public location.

With AI knocking at the door corporations are in a gold rush for data before humanity becomes privy to what it means.

AI is legalized intellectual theft and breaks so many laws (privacy, copyright) yet it's a magic box that randomizes who is stolen from so people accept it.

All the business-speak about data privacy is an attempt to hold the general public at bay.

its the same exact reasoning given in the hearings to ban China EV companies from collecting driver data before the exact same congress.

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