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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: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:18PM (5 children)
Coming originally from the US, I used to be of the opinion that anything public - like your car visible in your driveway - should be public information. I have since come around to the European viewpoint: even "public" information should be private. There is so much "public" information available - and now we have the means to collect it - that the totality of that information is massively intrusive. Where did you drive, what shops do you frequent, who are your friends, how late do you go to bed. All of that is easily obtainable from the collection of surveillance devices that aren't even aimed at you specifically: red-light cameras, your neighbor's security cam, etc, etc..
Not only should this information not be available to private companies, it should also not be available to the government. If the police have reason to suspect you of something, they'll just have to get a warrant, and capture data going forward, on their own devices. Government, after all, is also just a collection of individuals, none of who are innately more trustworthy than any other random person on the street.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @10:03PM
Another option -- require insurance companies that use this kind of harvested data to divulge what they are using to determine your rate. This could be on-request, if my car insurance goes up a few % each year I'm not going to complain. This way you have a chance to figure out why the price is higher than expected... and maybe even correct the quote (in some cases).
As things stand now in USA, usually the only way to fight a high insurance quote is to switch to a different company or agent and try again. At least around here (Great Lakes area), there are no shortage of companies looking for this business, plenty of competition.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday May 05 2019, @01:31PM (5 children)
This doesn't seem to fall under google's recent "automatic deletion" plan.
If this takes root across the industry, that'll not be very pro-consumer. I don't even have an account with google and this is another way that their collected data could be used against people and for profit. I imagine disability (not picking weeds--LAZY!) or working long hours (the yard is NEGLECTED!) is tagged to an old google maps picture that doesn't reflect how it looks today is going to raise people's rates in the long-term. Even if the photo is from the time when someone else owned the house. How can someone contest any of this, I wonder?
If companies can mine old google street view and maps data for profit via some script, there should be some regulation regarding how often it's updated and what can be legally used and how it's fact checked, and to allow the insured to examine and contest any of the details.
I expect, though, that it'll be a closed system and if you don't like it you can... complain on social media, which will also be used to influence your risk scores.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:58PM (4 children)
There is a way to opt-out of google street view...
https://www.wikihow.com/Opt-Out-of-Google-Street-View [wikihow.com]
My neighbors are cops and have blurred their street views.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:41PM (1 child)
You can also get Google to correct inaccurate maps (such as the map to our home down the private road)... it only took me 5 years of constant nagging before they got it close enough to right that our Amazon deliveries stopped showing up on the next block over.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @08:41PM
Amazons AMZL shipping? They're worse than USPS who delivers everyone's mail on my street one house off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @09:53PM
Depending on how a driveway is configured, a front hedge can work wonders with StreetView -- my parent's house is on an older street and with the full hedge the Goog's camera got their mailbox at the street and about the first 50 feet of the 100 foot long curving driveway. No cars or house visible from that view (only from the aerial view).
My house has a shorter driveway, but garage is sideways (side load), so all you see are a couple of older cars stored further back in what was originally probably made for a "turnaround" extension of the driveway past the house.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @12:58PM
This is Hyperturtle posting without having logged in... thanks and I will give that a try!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:04PM
for a low low rate you can get online, go to the general and save some time
For those outside the USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJ4kM-Aqec [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:12PM (2 children)
There are no innocent data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @02:29PM (1 child)
Well, that's at least the quantum point of view.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday May 05 2019, @10:44PM
It may or may not be, you never know until you look. And if you look, you destroy the coherence of that connection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:37PM (3 children)
I remember hearing that in the early 90s camera vans were being sent through the streets of Germany, and deductions of socioeconomic class based on the state of houses and cars in the neighborhood were made. That information was sold to banks and car dealers, who could make "risk" adjustments to loan rates. I guess some of the clues they were looking for was type of cars parked (class), concentration of sat dishes on walls (foreigners), whether shutters were lowered during the day (lazy, jobless). I don't know if the ability to force Google to blur Streetview images came from outrage over this practice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:43PM (2 children)
Do the German homeowners still sweep and mop the sidewalks in front of their home? That used to be tradition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @04:07PM (1 child)
I believe every property owner is required to remove all hazards from the portion of the sidewalk that abuts their property. Twigs, stones, snow, ice, whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:16PM
I used to live next door to pre WWII German immigrants in Ohio. Every week they scrubbed down the sidewalks and even the street gutters in front of their home. I was told that's tradition.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @03:42PM (3 children)
Reading the study, the researchers looked at 7 variables found in each picture of a residence. 5 of them were found to improve the statistics.
Neighborhood type
Street View quality (i.e. the quality of the image Google took)
House Type
House Age
House Condition
"Building Density" and "Wealth of residents", were the other two and did not improve the statistics. My theory is that these are already captured by the insurance company's models.
So, how does one improve their situation so that the model produces lower risk profiles for them? By improving those 5 variables (at least in Poland). The problem is, there isn't much a person can do to change 4 of those. Only the "House Condition" is a variable a person can reasonably change. Of course a person could also move to a house that has better scores on the variables. That poses some questions across several dimensions; affordability, urban/rural distribution, traffic/congestion, racial factors, socio-economic factors and many more.
The study: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1904/1904.05270.pdf [arxiv.org]
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 05 2019, @05:18PM (2 children)
I wonder what causes the correlation between image quality and car accident risk (and if higher image quality means a higher or a lower risk).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Sunday May 05 2019, @06:26PM (1 child)
True correlation, as in not Texas Sharpshooter style P hacking, means one of 3 things. X causes Y, Y causes X or X and Y are both influenced by some third variable Z. Walk through a trailer park and count dents per 100 vehicles and compare it to one of those developments that has a stone sign out front. This is such an obvious gimme to anyone who hasn't spent their entire life in one economic class that I'm surprised the insurance companies hadn't already controlled for it. Applying this data creates a disincentive to buy a dumpy house and fix it. Those people are a little crazy anyway.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @08:22PM (2 children)
Various parts of people’s lives are statistically correlated with other parts. This means that if someone knows one thing about me, they know everything about me. Big brother is here!
The only thing left to do is to cord cut, go off the grid and survival prep my way to social oblivion. Armageddon will solve the statistical correlation problem for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @10:28PM (1 child)
Misleading the internet companies is not that hard. You can teach them all the incorrect things about you. It is entirely up to you. You have to go through a little inconvenience, but not much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @12:47AM
Any references or a summary of your tactics?
I keep location information turned off, don't use FB (but do use Google and Gmail), don't bank online.
I guess some of these count an inconveniences, but since I grew up well before they were even dreamed about, I don't feel like I'm missing much.