Comment by thequux
14 years ago
There's a simple solution to that: don't give a stream of location data. Chop it up into 5-second fragments, and fuzz the data by a meter or so to prevent re-assembly.
That would still be a very valuable dataset (for me at least), and almost completely free of PII.
Than again, I'm not an expert in these things; am I missing some way that this could be deanonymized?
Adding a meter to the GPS location of where my car starts and stops at the end of each day still tells you where my house is.
Even if you removed any IDs from the data and sufficiently fuzzed the location, speed, and timestamps, you are still left with a heatmap of where cars with OnStar drive most frequently.
In a city, that is probably anonymous. If you are in a rural area or drive along a route where your car makes up the majority of the data points, it still isn't.