Supposedly anonymized location data can identify individuals’ home addresses

Evidence

Another example is Safegraph, a company that partners with all those apps that are tracking your behavior to amass “high precision/low false positive” data collected “in background from large populations.” According to the Washington Post, the company collected 17 trillion location markers from 10 million smartphones in November 2016 alone, data that were sold to two university researchers, among others, for a detailed study of political influences on patterns of family behavior on Thanksgiving Day that year. Despite the widely employed euphemisms of “anonymization” and “deidentification,” Safegraph tracks individual devices and the movement of their owners throughout the day, producing data that are sufficiently granular to be able to identify individuals’ home locations. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 543

Categorization

• DEFINE: Exposes ‘anonymization’ and ‘deidentification’ as euphemisms by showing what the data actually permits.
• SHARE: Worth sending to any data-privacy researcher or journalist covering location tracking.
• XREF: connects to: There is no known effective method to anonymize location data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 767; Location and phone-sensor data reveal individuals and moods even when anonymized — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 766; Anonymous meta-data can be reliably de-anonymized with only three public data points — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 765 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• There is no known effective method to anonymize location data #corroborates (0.95) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 767
• Location and phone-sensor data reveal individuals and moods even when anonymized #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 766
• Anonymous meta-data can be reliably de-anonymized with only three public data points #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 765
• Anonymized medical records can be re-identified using public voter lists #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2298
• Fitness trackers leak geolocation data that serves no user benefit #corroborates (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 779