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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: 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]