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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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