London's Public Bike Data Can Tell Everyone Where You've Been 41
An anonymous reader writes "I recently posted this article with a few vizualizations and a bit of analysis about the risks associated with open data sets. Thought it might be of interest of Slashdot readers: 'This article is about a publicly available dataset of bicycle journey data that contains enough information to track the movements of individual cyclists across London, for a six month period just over a year ago.'"
Contradiction (Score:4, Informative)
From the article;
and with a little effort, it's possible to find the actual people who have made the journeys.
because (thankfully) it requires a fair bit of effort to actually identify individuals from the data
Is it "a little effort" or " a fair bit of effort"? The never go into what would need to be done to get the identity information.
Re:Seems ridiculously easy (Score:3, Informative)
It's not that simple.
You can't track from 'your house' to 'your work'. The tracking data is for London's bike hire scheme. These are picked up from specific 'docking points' around the city, and are returned to any docking point.
So you can only get 'station to station' data.
Um, what? (Score:2, Informative)
The dataset contains a Bike ID, not a customer ID. You can get the dataset yourself and look.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/our-feeds#on-this-page-4
And one of the suggestions they have is to map the bike journeys.
There is a similar set for the underground.