Comment by hamhock666
1 day ago
Isn’t this GPS data to see where Covid has spread? Even if your name is anonymous, a GPS point that every day goes to your work and then your home is surely you?
1 day ago
Isn’t this GPS data to see where Covid has spread? Even if your name is anonymous, a GPS point that every day goes to your work and then your home is surely you?
Most probably, yes. But how would you know who I am and where I live? And if you do know both of those things, are there other ways of figuring out my routines? Yes, there are.
Keeping the name out of that data does a lot for privacy. With a name in there, you could use the data to find my name and figure out my address. Without the name in there, you don't know which point I even am without knowing some of my locations from another source.
Correlating data with another source is half of what data brokers do, so I wouldn't really say that is any level of privacy protection.
Where are you getting GPS from? Grandparent commenter talked about bluetooth beacons and parent suggested reading the docs.
The contact tracing APIs very deliberately avoided GPS for exactly the reason you mention.