Group items tagged

A similar situation was cited by Princeton University researchers Arvind Narayanan and Edward W. Felten in a recent response to Cavoukian and Castro. The pair wrote that, in one data set where location data had supposedly been anonymized, it was still possible in 95 per cent of test cases to re-identify users “given four random spatio-temporal points” – and 50 per cent if the researchers only had two. In other words, de-identifying location data is moot if you know where a target lives, where they work and have two other co-ordinates they visit with regularity.

"Why do they have that?" Seay said of the information about his daughter's death. "What do they need that for? How she died, when she died? It's not really personal, but looking at them, it is. That's not something they would ever need."

Dixon's group has found companies selling data on rape victims, seniors suffering from dementia and people diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. She said companies created powerful data sets by combining personal information available from public records, census information and social media."All of us are on these lists, and right now we don't even have the right to find out what list we're on or what they say about us," Dixon said. "And I think it's becoming increasingly important for us to see this information and have some rights so we can get off these lists. For this father and mother, I can't think of a worse thing."

narrow focus on individual responsibility is not enough. The scale of the problem far exceeds the individual: it is systemic. We are now faced with large-scale experiments on city streets where people are in a state of forced participation, without any real ability to negotiate the terms, and often without the knowledge their data is being collected.

We need a sweeping debate about ethics, boundaries and regulation for location data technologies.

Their real goal is to develop an international, self-updating creditworthiness database for other companies, such as online retailers.