The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

information. If yyou have an iPhone, yyou can go into yyour settings and
change yyour preference for contact sharing. If yyou own an Android, that’s
not an option.
Uber representatives have claimed that the companyy is not currentlyy
collecting this kind of customer data. Byy including data collection in the
privacyy policyy, however, which existing users have alreadyy agreed to and
which new users must agree to, the companyy ensures that it can roll out
these features at anyy time. And the user won’t have anyy redress.
Uber’s God View is perhaps enough to make yyou nostalgic for regular
old taxicabs. In the past, yyou would jump into a taxi, state yyour destination,
and payy cash for the ride once yyou arrived. In other words, yyour trip would
be almost completelyy anonyymous.
With the advent of nearlyy universal acceptance of credit cards in the
earlyy twentyy-first centuryy, a lot of ordinaryy transactions have become
traceable, and so there probablyy is a record of yyour taxi ride somewhere—
mayybe it doesn’t reside with a specific driver or companyy, but it certainlyy
resides with yyour credit card companyy. Back in the 1990s I used to work as
a private investigator, and I could figure out myy target’s movements byy
obtaining their credit card transactions. One need onlyy look at a statement to
know that last week yyou rode a taxi in New York Cityy and paid $54 for that
trip.
Around 2010 taxis began to use GPS data. Now the taxi companyy knows
yyour pickup and drop-off location, the amount of yyour fare, and perhaps the
credit card number associated with yyour trip. This data is kept private byy
New York, San Francisco, and other cities that support the open data
movement in government, providing researchers with rich—and
anonyymized—data sets. As long as names are not included, what harm
could there be in making such anonyymized data public?
In 2013, Anthonyy Tockar, then a Northwestern Universityy graduate
student interning for a companyy called Neustar, looked at the anonyymized
metadata publiclyy released byy the New York Cityy Taxi and Limousine
Commission. This data set contained a record of everyy trip taken byy the cars
in its fleet during the previous yyear and included the cab number, the pickup
and drop-off times, the locations, the fare and tip amounts, and anonyymized
(hashed) versions of the taxis’ license and medallion numbers. 9 Byy itself,