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Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

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Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#81

Post by toadi »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #65
nswanberg wrote: post #47

This article attempts to show what a local government could do, but does anyone have access to the sort of location dataset that could give one an intuition about how likely it would be that individuals would be singled out using the data shown? The article uses maps of Peoria, IL, so let's assume we're dealing with Peoria. There appear to be roughly 115K people between 18-64 in its metro area ( http://www.wolframalp…

You're assuming that individuals would have to be singled out for analysis in the first place. They wouldn't. With enough computing power, it'd be trivial to run this sort of analysis in near real-time for everyone. A few years down the line, this is even less of a concern: increased power, improved analysis tools, and greater efficiencies will all come together to empower just such a system at costs manageable by ma…

Well hopefully the google car comes available. No DUI anymore because you're not driving the car.

If it's all automated there are no traffic violations anymore. So the system won't be used for this.

I'm all for safe traffic!

Things liken an Arabic Revolution are not possible anymore.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#82

Post by meowface »

bwilliams18 wrote: post #70
meowface wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't justify it. The NSA should be barred from further operations like this. I can think it's wrong, while still not personally fearing the NSA looking at my personal data.

Would I be right to say it isn't a lack of fear, its just a much reduced fear?

Sure. If an analyst was directly looking at web traffic and behavioral patterns of mine, I'd certainly be a bit creeped out. But in reality it's fairly unlikely to occur.

I still don't think anyone should be suspect to that (without a formal warrant), but it's just not a concern for me.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#83

Post by estebank »

lstamour wrote: post #71

Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...) Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)

Think of this: face recognition is only as good as the pool of identities you're checking against. If the police car scans the plate of a car being trailed, it knows the owners identity. From there, the police mounted camera (you know that's coming) can check the drivers identity against the owner as well as the owner's social graph, and with a high degree of certainty have the identity of everybody in the car, within seconds of stopping the car. If you couple this with broad camera coverage, where you can track anybody backwards in time just long enough to get a shot of that person getting out of its car (it's easy to follow a body across cameras, much easier than identifying a face against 350 million possible persons), or from a public transport where you've used an identifiable rfid card, you now have a small pool to check against, and because you have a selection of headshots from every angle, you can confirm the identity.

Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true.

I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#85

Post by antimagic »

tikhonj wrote: post #59
cjoh wrote: post #40

It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture. From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this. I kno…

Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.

I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens.

Still, it's completely crazy. These types of system are a direct threat to democracy and need to be shut down. In fact it's worse than that. At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#86

Post by _mulder_ »

lstamour wrote: post #71

Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...) Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)

But a self-driving car would be the perfect antidote to DUI offences! Interesting that you would place overblown and misleading fears over Government tracking before the increased personal safety a self-driving car could potential bring (eliminating DUI being a great example)!

Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#87

Post by _mulder_ »

antimagic wrote: post #85
tikhonj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the issue with government is that you ultimately have much less recourse against the government than against anyone else. This exacerbates the potential damage the government could do with any given technology.

I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens. Still, it's comple…

>At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law.

The year 1990 called and wants it's comment back!

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#88

Post by antimagic »

_mulder_ wrote: post #87
antimagic wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'd be happier with the technology if the first deployment was used specifically to track police officers in an effort to weed out corrupt police. Let the program run for say 10 years, enough time to make police aware of how this sort of data can be misused by making them the victims first. As a bonus, weeding out corrupt cops will make the system safer (but not safe) for ordinary citizens. Still, it's comple…

>At some point a telecom is going to realize that they could make a tidy profit by selling location traffic data to third parties, and that sort of thing needs to be prevented in law. The year 1990 called and wants it's comment back!

You're saying that telecoms are already selling the data? Or that there are already laws preventing the sale of such data?

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#90

Post by aestra »

lstamour wrote: post #71

Suddenly I'm not as sure I want a self-driving car. Then again, if there are no tracking cookies, maybe they can't tell if I'm in it? (Wishful thinking, I'm sure...) Of course a self-driving car would defeat the need to catch someone after a party perhaps, so bad example? :)

What exactly would a self driving car have to do with this? This is talking about tracking by cell phone data and license plate, not car data. A self driving car would be the same as a regular car, just with extra sensors, the ones they have now are at least. Who is to say that it would have extra tracking?
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