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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Data cleanup is also a great use. For example, we needed to parse an amount of address data, we just needed country, state (or equivalent), city, we gave out each address three times, whatever results were the same at least twice was accepted. We had over 92% where all three were the same, another 7% with 2-1 (required review), less than 1% needed either manual cleanup before re-Turking or just manually entering some of the more gnarly cases. We considered it a truly massive success, price efficient and absolutely unbelievable quick.

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You outsourced personal data to mechanical turk ? Can I have the name of your company ?

Addresses are public data.

It doesn't seem to be just addresses since they are extracted from something.

This comment makes no sense to me and it seems like you’re pushing this point with a lot of force.

Of course there is context in how the addresses are used. But the reviewers may not have had access to the context. Since addresses are public data, the question remains.. what is the harm?

I've mentioned this in a few places but it seems to be ignored:

The account that posts the addresses is assosciated with some company. If that company isn't just 'Generic Consulting Company' then there is some context derived from the account name.

ie: This account is owned by 'XXX Toys', and they're asking me to clean up this address information. I guess someone at this address ordered some adult toys.

> If that company isn't just 'Generic Consulting Company'

But it is. I am just a small consulting company here, working for various clients and turkers have no idea who I work for, especially because most of the time even that is under NDA. (And as I noted above, this was a B2B sort of thing, so people got themselves into a tizzy over the addresses of businesses all around the world.)

You are making a ton of assumptions with absolutely zero evidence and using that as the basis of an argument for attacking the company. Fortunately he replied stating that it is a small consulting company, which is exactly what you'd expect, thus making your entire argument moot.

I'm not making any assumptions about anything, and I'm not attacking any company. I'm addressing the point that jamra made above, which is a general commenting stating that publishing a list of addresses is harmless because addresses are public data.

Is address data without a name/email or phone number to link it to really personal data?

They extracted it, so it means it was in a context. Address + context is very much personal.

Also I note that the comment author prefers not to answer.

I don't know. If it's just an address, you can get it from Google Maps Street View. To find out who is in a specific address is what makes it personal.

A list of addresses usually has some context* - the combination of the address and the context could be personal.

For example, a list of customers' addresses for a sex toy shop would be personal even though it was a subset of the non-personal list of all addresses.

*unless it's just a list of every address in the country, obviously

I disagree. The turkers don't need to know that they're extracting the "country, state (or equivalent), city," from a list of adult store customers in order to extract that data. Sharing the context is superfluous to requirements in this instance, so likely is not included in the task mandate.

That information wouldn't be directly included, but some account has to post the hit. That account is either associated with some company or some person who works for some company.

Why would Amazon pass that information to turkers?

"Find city, county, state in this list and post in the three boxes "City" "County" "State" in the web form." is literally all the information required for this task. All of the rest can be handled by Amazon's staff, or more likely automated processes. The turker need not know for whom they do the work, or why. They could be processing marketing communications, or census returns, or credit card applications, or literally anything else where an address may be used.

mTurkers get to pick and choose which hits they want to work on. They see a list of available hits, and each has a title, description, submitter, estimated time, and reward. The submitter matters to mTurkers because this allows them to see the hit acceptance rate (how often the submitter pays out on submissions, or how often they reject submissions).

So it's simply a fact of the platform that mTurkers know who they are working for.

Does the submitter have to use their or their company's real name? As long as it does the job of a name (stable, recognizable) it could be any name and still accomplish the goal of letting the MT worker sift through hits.

I don't think there is any requirement to use real names.

Did not know that. Seems... Weird. Thanks.

They extracted it, so it means it was in a context. Address + context is very much personal.

That doesn't mean it was available to the MT workers. Why would it be?

Also I note that the comment author prefers not to answer.

They haven't made any new post since that one, how do you know if they even saw yours?

In the case of a list of addresses, just knowing the company or person associated with the Mturk task could be enough context to reveal information about the person(s) living at that address.

Even if it's just an ID, if you know the company you work for is a specialised online shop and you see your neighbor's address on there (assume rural area), you know they ordered with them. Depending on the kind of store that can already be critical.

Because he was asleep :)

The data set was of businesses not personal so this concern didn't occur. I would guess if it would've been PII potential then we would've wiped out the numbers first , it's not needed for city-state-country anyways.

I know of one application that at least used to use MTurk to validate OCR translation of business cards. I'd guess that if you hand out a business card, you don't have an expectation that the data on there would be private.

I played with MTurk as a worker about 6 years ago. Lots of the better paying jobs were either doing audio transcriptions or quality checking OCR jobs.

is this not re-captcha -able?

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