"Anonymized" is a controversial term. Let me be very clear about the model we are moving to.
We are going "aggregated" so there are no GPS lines or raw feeds as consumable outputs. It is instead counters on places...e.g. how many people went to Safeway? What was the average speed at this road segment? We will show big patterns, such as where did the people who went to Safeway come from, but that will be done in 50 user blocks with randomized locations within census zones. Even Apple, as ostensibly the most privacy conscious company out there, uses their aggregated location data in similar ways (see Apple Maps Mobility Trends Reports).
If using aggregated data is bad, that will mean that we will not have basic things we all rely on such as traffic ETAs in nav apps, because that data was ultimately from probes in the real world. Should we outlaw this? There is a ton of nuance.
Re your link to the NYTimes and that type of data feed, I still think there is a huge gap between perception and reality, and from what I know of the industry there are generally very strong contractual commitments by partners to limit how these databases are used. If a partner who has direct access to a location data feed that includes raw data and breaches a contract, yes, people could in theory be "de-identified." That would also apply to Amazon for your S3 storage, or your phone carrier. I don't know where the NYTimes data came from, but I can say that all of our prior partners had very strict limitations on how the data could be used.
I hope that one solution from all this is that there are much strong penalties, including criminal ones, for misuse of data. It isn't a data broker issue per se - employees at companies for example are probably a much more real risk vector because the tools to access the data on a user-level exist. People should go to jail if they abuse it, either in first party or third party form.
We are going "aggregated" so there are no GPS lines or raw feeds as consumable outputs. It is instead counters on places...e.g. how many people went to Safeway? What was the average speed at this road segment? We will show big patterns, such as where did the people who went to Safeway come from, but that will be done in 50 user blocks with randomized locations within census zones. Even Apple, as ostensibly the most privacy conscious company out there, uses their aggregated location data in similar ways (see Apple Maps Mobility Trends Reports).
If using aggregated data is bad, that will mean that we will not have basic things we all rely on such as traffic ETAs in nav apps, because that data was ultimately from probes in the real world. Should we outlaw this? There is a ton of nuance.
Re your link to the NYTimes and that type of data feed, I still think there is a huge gap between perception and reality, and from what I know of the industry there are generally very strong contractual commitments by partners to limit how these databases are used. If a partner who has direct access to a location data feed that includes raw data and breaches a contract, yes, people could in theory be "de-identified." That would also apply to Amazon for your S3 storage, or your phone carrier. I don't know where the NYTimes data came from, but I can say that all of our prior partners had very strict limitations on how the data could be used.
I hope that one solution from all this is that there are much strong penalties, including criminal ones, for misuse of data. It isn't a data broker issue per se - employees at companies for example are probably a much more real risk vector because the tools to access the data on a user-level exist. People should go to jail if they abuse it, either in first party or third party form.
And, this is all for naught if some of the government rumors about direct taps into wireless carriers are true.... https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...