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Sixty-seven percent of smartphone users rely on Google Maps to help them get to where they are going quickly and efficiently.
A major of[sic] feature of Google Maps is its ability to predict how long different navigation routes will take. That's possible because the mobile phone of each person using Google Maps sends data about its location and speed back to Google's servers, where it is analyzed to generate new data about traffic conditions.Information like this is useful for navigation. But the exact same data that is used to predict traffic patterns can also be used to predict other kinds of information – information people might not be comfortable with revealing.
For example, data about a mobile phone's past location and movement patterns can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where they attend religious services and the age range of their children based on where they drop them off for school.
Perhaps we can carefully craft our data patterns to tell advertisers, "Take a hike!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @11:10PM (1 child)
So they can't keep an individual's records - so no following you around after the fact.
But how many makes an aggregate? Tow data points? So you and your wife's phones... 3? Add 1 kid. 50? A single school bus...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 12 2019, @02:51PM
Actually, it can, in some cases, be okay to keep individual data points if they are sufficiently anonymized. Here are 35 android device data location points indicating a line of stopped cars. Little more than 35 GPS coordinates.
If only they could have, or by law have, an attitude of keeping the least amount of useful information for the shortest amount of time it is useful.
Even if it may be possible to reconstruct a history of an anonymous data point, and try to infer other things about it, this would at least significantly raise the bar compared to it being a simple index lookup.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.