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.'"
Re:Seems ridiculously easy (Score:3, Interesting)
Except said stalker has a different problem set than the article's author. The author is looking at the data, and picking out an individual. It is a whole different problem to take an individual, that you have some information about, and pick them out.
So maybe the stalker is looking at an employee of some establishment. He watches when that employee comes in for a few days. Lots of people use the same bike terminal, but how many individuals checked in at 8 am today, 8:03 yesterday, 7:58 the day before?
Before he may have had to follow his prey home, case them through social engagements... now, collect data in the same place every day for a few days, and he has a literal map of their life; all with no danger of exposing himself.
This is far too easy to abuse, and a danger to too many people. It could be used to kidnap children of rich people, it could be used to rob drug dealers, it could be used to track women back to their homes to rape, it could be used to ambush ex-lovers or their new spouses.
Frankly, it is actually putting people in danger in a way that is especially enormously terrible since it would be so easy to avoid. Why would you EVER publish unique identifiers that map to people like that? I can understand this was probably an oversight, but it really is indefensible as an intentional disclosure.