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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Google Street View has become a surprisingly useful way to learn about the world without stepping into it. People use it to plan journeys, to explore holiday destinations, and to virtually stalk friends and enemies alike.
But researchers have found more insidious uses. In 2017 a team of researchers used the images to study the distribution of car types in the US and then used that data to determine the demographic makeup of the country. It turns out that the car you drive is a surprisingly reliable proxy for your income level, your education, your occupation, and even the way you vote in elections.
Now a different group has gone even further. Łukasz Kidziński at Stanford University in California and Kinga Kita-Wojciechowska at the University of Warsaw in Poland have used Street View images of people's houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in a car accident. That's valuable information that an insurance company could use to set premiums.
The result raises important questions about the way personal information can leak from seemingly innocent data sets and whether organizations should be able to use it for commercial purposes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:35PM (3 children)
The problem is: if the information is valuable enough, the government and/or private companies will just go out and collect it, like Google sending out their street view cars. In 1987 Florida DOT (and many others, I'm sure, I just happened to work there) would send out an employee with a video camera to drive and record the roadside before a construction project, to document the "before" condition of the site - then after the job was done, if a property owner came with claims of damage from the construction, they at least had some record to know if the claims had a basis in fact, or fantasy.
The internet and "big data" bring many terrific things to our lives, but with great change also comes great discomfort, in some areas. Native tribes who believed that photographs were stealing their souls were probably more prophetic than anyone gave them credit for 50 years ago.
Already, we have moved to a home that is 1/4 mile down a winding private road - that private road costs us about $500 per year in shared maintenance costs with the neighbors, but it also buys us privacy from the Google Street View cameras. When we bought the home, we valued that privacy, not specifically from Google's cameras, but from the noise and prying eyes of street traffic in general. I find it quite liberating to be able to leave the garage door open while I walk around to the other side of the house and not worry that miscreants might do a quick hit-and-run on my tool collection.
The classic 0.24 acre suburban subdivision lot on public streets doesn't give that kind of privacy, but these kinds of changes in the world in general may start driving gated communities and other changes toward increased privacy to have more value for more people.
Just passing laws against collecting highly public information isn't going to stop that information from being collected for private and undisclosed government uses. I'd really rather not live in a world where my consumer digital camera is restricted, by legal requirement, from imaging other people's public facing property without explicit permission - mostly because there will be so many millions of unrestricted cameras operating anyway, it would seem an even worse un-level playing field.
I like, generally, how Google operates - they collect your info, sure, but they are in-your-face about it; unlike the NSA et al. who have been doing the same for decades more, but only reveal that to you implicitly by exfiltrating you to Gitmo based on what they think they know from the data they have collected.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 05 2019, @05:11PM (2 children)
For companies, you just need appropriate privacy laws, a public that cares, and courts that enforce them. In Germany, Google was forced to mask houses where the owners wanted it, and then stopped recording further places altogether.
For governments, it's harder, because they can simply make the laws for whatever they want to do. There, only the constitution can stop them (and again, you need good courts, and someone who bothers to sue).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:23PM
That can work in Germany, and maybe with the bigger US-global corporations, culturally I don't see 'muricans giving up their God given right to keep whatever "proprietary trade secret private corporate database information" they want about whatever and whoever they want, particularly when it makes them money.
And, as we all know, the President of this great land has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, so help him God - effective as his campaign promises that oath appears to have been.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:31PM
Point #2 about "private information" in 'murica: HIPAA - barely made a dent in actual privacy of personal health information, but generated a mountain range of reactionary paperwork, became the instant excuse of choice for every secrecy coveting miscreant anywhere near the health care profession, created JOBS JOBS JOBS in compliance consultancy, software updates, etc. but: if I want to know whether or not your wife has lung cancer? I don't think that's any harder to find out today than it was pre-HIPAA.
The only thing HIPAA did positively impact is that nobody is (publicly) advertising pay-for-access global health information databases - I believe that without HIPAA American citizens' health record information would be up for sale just like our real-estate ownership, arrest, phone, and credit information is today.
🌻🌻 [google.com]