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Given the history of people being identified from "anonymous" records (thanks a lot , information theory) ... well, I'm glad I'm not banking with the NAB.
Well, let's just call them, uh, Mr. X and Mrs. Y. So anyway, Mr.X would say, 'Marge, if this doesn't get your motor running, my name isn't "Homer J. Simpson."
If we go by the history of such anonymization attempts (AOL, Netflix) it is only a matter of time that someone figures out how to get PII from this data.
They probably constructed a simple decision tree aggregate which is probably less than 10kb of data. I doubt anyone could extrapolate 10kb data into personalized details of an individual.
I punched in my details and there are approximately 100 people like me. What has occurred to me is that people like me (20's, single) that live in rich mobile areas of Sydney spend less than the national average across most things, and overall. But also, compared to people like me, I get away with about 1/8th of what everybody else spends, and do not feel poor. To the contrary in fact. What is going on here? I am inc…
- single does not mean no kids
- once you are in debt, you may have problems getting out of it (you spend a lot on credit repayment rates)
- does spending include investment? for example would a life insurance / retirement fund count towards "spending"?
Spooky. Tried it out and found it's prediction accurate for brands and companies I might use. Which was disappointing in a way, I was hoping I might find something new to try. Instead I'm well, just like me....
Given the history of people being identified from "anonymous" records (thanks a lot , information theory) ... well, I'm glad I'm not banking with the NAB.
Basically you just pick a few things like your age, salary and where you live, and then out of all of the people out there "like you", you're shown an average of where people like you tend to spend their money (travel, food, etc.).
Even if you spent a lot of time manipulating the data to try and get it to tell you one person's spending by category (assuming it were possible), the data would be relatively meaningless.
Given the history of people being identified from "anonymous" records (thanks a lot , information theory) ... well, I'm glad I'm not banking with the NAB.
You misunderstand. This is not an anonymous data-dump like the AOL fiasco, and there is no way to get any raw data. Basically you just pick a few things like your age, salary and where you live, and then out of all of the people out there "like you", you're shown an average of where people like you tend to spend their money (travel, food, etc.). Even if you spent a lot of time manipulating the data to try and get it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your identity isn't attached... it isn't your history. It's just 'a' history.
I work for an Australian Bank. We had an internal competition where they didn't sanitise the data for this competition well enough. After a week of analysing the data one of the people in competing in the competition knew who's data we were looking at. It was a friend of theirs. All identifying information had been removed/sanitised, they could tell from looking at the spending habits. I disagree with your statement.
Ask that person to go and find my details, and they will surely fail. Because they know nothing about me, and the transaction history doesn't tell them anything... thus it is not 'identifying'.
Kind of cool, but I bank with the bank in question (Ubank / National Australia Bank) and I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable that they'd use my transaction history like this.
We also took an extra step around setting a minimum uniqueness level of 'Less than 10' - so there won't ever be a scenario shown for 1/2/5 PeopleLikeU as queried in the comments below.
Hope you enjoy the experience - we really wanted to give the value of the data safely back to the people who created it to help you make more informed decisions on what, where and how much you spend.
Feel free to tweet me @jbewes or the team @Ubank, or even Facebook msg them facebook.com/ubank if you've any more queries.
Cheers, Jen :)
For what its worth they have not "released" the data. I cannot copy any of the text from the FAQ section but if you browse the FAQs and "about this site" it looks like the whole site is basically an ad/demo of Market Blueprint[1]. But I could be wrong. estromiund, do you know where they released the data? [1] http://www.quantium.com.au/market-blueprint