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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @07:01PM
They pretty much already did. Crime rates, crime type, and zip code show a lot more about what is going on. Because guess what poor people live in cheap areas and rich people live in rich areas.
The SJW type has decided that also correlates to the color of your skin or nationality. Not because of 'racism' but because social mobility is tough with out greenbacks. Hell I moved a couple of years ago from one city to another and that was tough as balls. I was moving around in the same social strata! With no money you are moving pretty much nowhere. So they have switched up metrics. But those metrics are just fungible substitutes for the ones they have deemed racist. So yeah insurance companies and banks already had it figured out. They both talk about 'risk'. They use whatever metrics they can to figure out how much you make and likelyhood of payback all to see if they can become middlemen in any deals you make to get a cut.