How do you plan to spend the holidays? Don't answer the company's safe Graph probably has a good idea already. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this is text Uff Daily. Adrian Jeffreys wrote a piece for the Outline dot com that was more than a little alarming. Jeffreys reported on a study that found family members who subscribed to different political ideologies spend less time together during holidays. That in itself isn't alarming. What was alarming was the source of the
researchers data from which they drew this conclusion. That source was a company called safe Graph, which gave the researchers access to seventeen trillion location markers that came from ten million smartphones. That means the researchers had seventeen trillion points of data related to those smartphones locations over the course of the sixteen Thanksgiving holiday. Even your most dedicated gum shoe isn't likely to rack up that much information about
to mark their tailing. Using this data, the researchers were able to extrapolate some other information. For example, they worked under the assumption that if a smartphones location was frequently in the same spot between the hours of one and four am, it was most likely the home of the smartphone's owner. Sure, you might go out clubbing once in a while, but probably not every day of the week
unless you're Steffon. They also looked at location data for mobile devices during the hours of one and five PM on Thanksgiving Day to see how many people were spending the holiday at a different location or in transit. On the surface, this data is anonymous. There's no overt link between the location data and any individual's identity. However, it doesn't take much sleuthing to figure out which smartphone belongs
to any particular person. If I look at detailed location markers linked to your device, and I have a passing familiarity with your habits, it's probably not going to take me long to connect the dots, and then I can rack wherever you go. How did safe graph get this information in the first place. Well, it works with app developers to get that data. In some cases, safe graph
relies upon an API or application programming interface. The purpose of an API is to allow developers the chance to create new apps that can communicate with and take advantage of other apps. This allows for a mutually beneficial relationship between multiple applications. In other cases, safe graph negotiates a price for that information. It's true everywhere, but especially for
the online world, information is valuable. There are entire companies that exist solely to buy and sell massive amounts of data about users. And again, while on the surface that data may not be associated with a specific name, it typically doesn't take a lot of work to associate a specific person with a particular device or set of behaviors.
Studies bear this out. A research paper published in Science in showed that by analyzing meta data connected to credit card transactions, it was trivial to connect purchases to specific people. This was after all personal data had been scrubbed from the information. The data sets included dates, the amounts that were charged, and the stores that were visited. There were no names, no credit card numbers, or any other information that overtly identified the card owners. It was the behavior
of shoppers that made them easy to identify. That, coupled with publicly available information such as public posts on social media, made it simple to re identify nine of the shoppers in the study. This research paper isn't an outlier. There have been numerous other studies that have shown that massive amounts of supposedly anonymous information give anyone with patients enough of a lead to identify specific people among that data set, and as you might imagine, this poses a serious threat
to people's privacy. It doesn't take a worse case scenario to see how all this data mining and analysis could go wrong. There are plenty of people who would love to take advantage of all that information. Some want to send targeted advertising to users. In a typical implementation, an algorithm would match adds to the people most likely to find those ads interesting. Some people might find that approach off putting or irritating, but it's one of the more
benign uses for all that data. Others might take the information and use it for all sorts of nefarious purposes. It's not a stretch to imagine a situation in which someone uses this kind of data to blackmail a target. Just imagine getting a phone call and hearing someone say, hey, you called out sick to work yesterday, but I see you were actually visiting an amusement park all day long. Not that I would ever miss work to go to
an amusement park. Or imagine an insurance company combing through this data to figure out how much it should charge customers based on their behaviors, or a company using it to keep an eye on what employees are doing off the clock. It's a massive invasion of privacy. So what's the solution? From a personal standpoint? You can turn off location features on your devices That will help a bit.
You can avoid attaching location data to social posts. You can turn social posts to private or limit giving information about the places you go to and the things you do on social media. In short, you can withdraw from many of the activities that are becoming more common in everyday life. It's not a fun answer, but it is an honest one. Even then, there are things that may
be outside your awareness or control that are being tracked. Ultimately, what we might need our regulations on how companies can collect and perhaps more importantly, profit from the data we generate. Here's hoping you have a happy and safe holiday season. If you want to learn more about online privacy, GPS, technology and big data, subscribe to The Tech Stuff podcast. We explore technology on all scales in a long form podcast that publishes every Wednesday and Friday. I'll see you again soon.