Your Morning Commute is Unique | Hacker News Reader

Your Morning Commute is Unique

33bits.org

72 pointsrandomwalker14 comments

I've read the post, and I've skimmed the paper on which it is based. It's an interesting premise: if you know which census tract a person lives in, you can identify them down to about 1:1500; if you also know which census tract they work in, you can up your percentages to about 1:20.

But I'm missing the threat. What's an example of where this particular knowledge (feel free to assume for sake of argument that the pair is actually unique) leads to either personal disaster or a chilling effect? I presume it exists, but I'm not seeing how it compares to something like showing your ID (with address) to use a credit card.

Part of the point of the paper is to show, yet again, that data that could be considered sufficiently anonymized by stripping IP addresses names etc. is not anonymous enough.

Your credit card information identifies you, but you generally don't give your credit card information to any location based service you might want to use.

Additionally, there's still this thing called cash, or visiting places that don't require exchanging money.

A location profile could expose information like your doctors, what restaurants/bars/clubs you like, where you shop, who your friends are, what political or religious places/events you attend... do I need to go on?

Summary: your home and work locations represent a simple "hashing function" that will allow firms to uniquely identify us. This information on the surface wouldn’t seem to represent a privacy risk but is and it's becoming easier for third parties to collect with the proliferation of location based services.

Ignoring the privacy issues, I think universities would be an exception, as many student/staff live on/near campus. I suspect people who work from home would make up a disproportionate number of the collisions (as they reduce two dimensions into one) - so perhaps their is privacy in that.

> To understand the privacy threats

As Bruce Schneier has written, there is no such thing as privacy.

Bruce Schneier, "Privacy in the age of persistence"

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/02/privacy_in_the...

"It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises."

-Theodore Kaczynski

That makes little sense. Schneier was talking about the far future. It's certainly not an assumption that people make as they go about their daily lives. "Eventually," we'll be a spacefaring civilization, so why bother with anything on Earth?

Also, if you're going to claim something absurd like technology and freedom being incompatible, you're going to have to do better than quoting the Unabomber.

> Also, if you're going to claim something absurd like technology and freedom being incompatible, you're going to have to do better than quoting the Unabomber.

You're making two mistakes...

1) Technology being abused to curtail freedom isn't "absurd," but a routine occurrence in our world. From traffic cameras to chipped passports, for every freedom we gain from technology, we lose at least one.

2) You're shooting the messenger. While I also disagree with his pessimistic conclusion, there have been many truths said by those we seek to demonize.

I take issue with point #1, that is true in a lot of cases but not necessarily so, it all depends on what people are willing to accept. While I do agree that the notion of privacy will always lose to technology, and if you believe that privacy is key part of freedom (debatable) then I grant you that point.

1. Counter example: The development of better agriculture freed serfs & at a later time in the US slaves.

2. Modern travel has freed people from oppressive regimes around the world.

3. The internet is having a liberating effect on the freedom and control of information.

4. Modern medicine frees us from the threats of many diseases.

Technology can be equally used for good and evil.

Your definition of freedom, as implied by items 4 & 1, is sloppy and dangerous. The parent posts use the word freedom in the political sense, as an antonym to slavery, subjugation, and tyranny.

Modern medicine raises our standard of living by eliminating disease, which is mostly irrelevant to a discussion of the unique causal effects technology has on freedom.

The best take on privacy I've ever read (and the only one that actually made me pause and wonder about the hidden assumptions in my thinking) was Jonathan Franzen's Imperial Bedroom ( in http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&... , although I didn't find a direct link).

He basically claims that privacy as we know it is an invention of our age (late 20th century, early 21st), and, as such, it is not necessarily something worth keeping at all costs.

Clean water, improved healthcare, ..., the internet are all modern innovations, however, I think they are worth keeping.

Just because we survived without something in the past, doesn't mean it isn't something worth fighting for.

I was just thinking about the very same thing yesterday.

Home to work commute tagged with time can help many application to alert high traffic or better times to travel, car pooling.

It would also be interesting to watch what others are doing in and around my area at any point of time.

Visualisation would be the key.

Did you read the article? He doesn't think this would be "cool"! He's saying that this could be used to identify people who thought they were anonymous. The main point he makes is that people consider the fact identification is difficult if someone has only one location, but overlook that it's much easier if someone has two locations.

Yes I have read the article and as other people have pointed out I too am missing the threat. This is like saying I will pull out the identity of the person who browsed through my blog and left a comment. It is definitely possibly to do it over a period of repeated visits. And assuming I spend all that time to dig out information.

So, instead I am positively noting that you cannot assume it is anonymous and think of ways I would benefit from it whether identified at an aggregate level or an approximation or even uniquely.

The author listed few examples which he words as 'exploits' the non-anonymity and I mentioned few more but rather positively. It might be a very fascinating view of the web if we can start browsing it from a world map, don't you think so ?

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