“People should be asking themselves what happens with this data, what type of inferences can be drawn from this data,” says Marc Goodman.
“If your self-tracking health device shows that you lead a sedentary lifestyle, then maybe you will pay more for insurance,” Consumers should be careful about letting any company track health data that can be used against them.
A few years ago Disney introduced Finger Scanners in their Theme Parks. These machines are used to keep Disney World customers from sharing or re-selling their admission tickets, and are part of a general and growing police-state climate at the parks that includes routine bag-searches at each park entrance.
We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.
These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual’s privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.
What kind of data is your cell phone company collecting? Malte Spitz wasn’t too worried when he asked his operator in Germany to share information stored about him. Multiple unanswered requests and a lawsuit later, Spitz received 35,830 lines of code — a detailed, nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.
A new bill moving through Congress would give the authorities unprecedented access to citizens’ information.
Cookies are tracking our online behavior for advertising purposes, but a company specializing in retail analytics called Euclid, Inc. is moving that concept into real world shopping experiences.
Euclid uses open WiFi access points to track shopper behavior across stores: It does this by collecting the MAC address of smart phones as they passively connect to open networks while people shop, anonymizing the data, putting it into a giant database that then recognizes the device when it goes near any other Euclid customer’s network.
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse published a list of data brokers and possibilities to opt out.
Retailers are deploying mannequins equipped with cameras that watch for shoplifters and record shopper behavior to improve sales. Several dozen EyeSee mannequins are already watching shoppers and gathering data with their camera eyes.
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