FOILing NYC’s Taxi Trip Data
chriswhong.com
chriswhong.com
Edit: Talked to Chris on Facebook. He is in the process of uploading it to someone who has volunteered to host and I have offered to host on Summon.com
If you can host/mirror this data please reply here.
Also, BitTorrent was built for this, as mentioned elsewhere...
That's a completely sensible stipulation. It's imperfect like all security, but it's a legitimate reason rather than just a barrier.
I'm guessing it's more to make sure the drive is in working order and clean of any data. This would limit liability for accidentally deleted data and broken drives. If the drive doesn't work, it's still under warranty. It also saves time on trying to make an old drive work.
A new drive equals zero hassle for them.
I'm thinking the biggest concern would be plugging in someone's drive who didn't know they had malware. In that case, the requirement works pretty well.
Presumably, the ex knows where the girlfriend lives...and I guess, he also knows what the new boyfriend looks like? So he watches the apartment until the BF leaves by taxi. The ex then notes the taxi's time of pickup. And then...
The ex waits a full month before calling up the TLC, buying a new hard drive, transferring a couple of GB, and then doing the data analysis to find that particular taxi that made a pickup within the vicinity of the girlfriend's apartment, and finding where that taxi made a dropoff?
And then the ex goes to those coordinates and...then what? Barges into one of high-rises and knock on every door until he finds the new boyfriend?
I think that if the psycho-ex were to act like a psycho, he probably will not do it through this kind of data analysis.
I find myself wanting to make a FOI request to my city. I have seen tricked out Parking Enforcement cars trolling the streets this year. They have license plate reading cameras mounted along the car's perimeter. I want to know if that information is stored, for how long, and who has access to it. Have any law enforcement agencies queried the database?
I would appreciate all the pointers I can get for proceeding with a FOI request. So far, I have been using MuckRock as my primary source of tutorial.
Now Manhattan may be dense enough it might not leak too much personal information but the same granularity of location data in a suburban or rural area may be very intrusive.
Since I've lived in NY, I've seen plenty of cool visualizations and stories...about where pickups happen, time of day, volume, etc., and I've periodically asked around, where does the data come from? Obviously I didn't ask well enough...because if all it took was an old-fashioned public request (and a brand new hard drive)...wow.
The trip data is interesting enough...but the fare data is really mind blowing. Everytime I get out of a cab, I wonder, "should I have tipped that much?" The (crowd-based) answer is apparently not that hard to find...
1. People aren't tipping 2. Cab drivers aren't reporting their tips.
Being a native new yorker, legality aside, I'd bet most cash tips go unreported. Reporting a tip makes that tip taxable, so there is a very strong incentive to bury it if they think they can avoid trouble or suspicion.