Somebody's Watching All of Us

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
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

(00:26):
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

(00:47):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:20):
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

(03:41):
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

(04:04):
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.

(04:25):
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

(04:48):
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

(05:08):
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.

(05:32):
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.