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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

“I don't know how people will react to seeing a heat map in real time of where all the phones are. I can imagine some people would be like, ‘That's the coolest thing!’ And I can imagine some people would be like, ‘That's the creepiest thing!’”

I don’t think I know anyone that would find that the coolest thing ever. maybe the companies that buy the data, sure.

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I think it's cool. I don't care that Foursquare has my location. And I continue to use Swarm because I want a record of where I've been and where I want to go.

After watching Long Shot on Netflix, sometimes I'm sort of glad I (and a few other companies) have a corroborated log of where I've been at specific times.

That's fine when it is under your control. But, it isn't. And companies are using it for their benefit, and will avoid your defense, short of a court order.

Of course it’s not under my control, it’s on their servers. I don’t mind that they build a location API with the data. Why should this bother me?

If you think location is the only thing these companies are collecting, you're mistaken. The data is sold to unknown third parties and freely given to dangerous governments. There are any number of bad outcomes possible, though I admit many are not likely.

The point is that these folks are not on your team, will never be, and are potentially malicious to you and your family. Why support them?

I just watched long shot to understand your comment :) in the Netherlands

It's cool until a religious politician takes power and slowly starts stacking things against people from other religions and atheists. Your data reveals that you attend the wrong religious building or no building at all. A few years later you get a free train trip to a fun re-education camp.

Or an atheist government uses it to re-educate religious people?

It was the coolest thing in the world when Foursquare first launched at SXSW years and years ago. You could see local checkins per-venue somehow so that you could find, or avoid, hot popular places. I'm glad to see they've gotten back to those roots — but I'm also glad I deleted my data when they turned into a data marketer.

> but I'm also glad I deleted my data when they turned into a data marketer.

Thanks, I needed a laugh today.

At what?

Shameless self-promotion, but I made this piece of art out of mobile data to ask that same question: http://bit.ly/gpsgenart

The image on the gallery site seems to be a photo of a print so here's a higher quality version and a few related images (gallery contract requires the watermarks):

http://bit.ly/2H8N9K4

http://bit.ly/2CauAB5

http://bit.ly/2UsSleJ

http://bit.ly/2EZd709

Honest question: if the source of the data was anonymous (as in gdpr anonymous, not “we use UUID instead of your name + SSN” anonymous) would you find it cooler? Because we have the tech, but struggling to properly monetize. Throwaway bc not sure if boss is OK with disclosure

The problem is that given enough data, you can infer the identity of a what would otherwise be an anonymous driver. If you could track an anonymous data point (person) for multiple days, you could find out where the location data was confined to for the longest times (home and work), etc.

Yeah, that's the problem we solved. there are a few caveats, but it's precisely why we don't consider UUIDs anonymous

How have you solved it? If you really have, then you're in a position to clean up, since nobody else has managed to crack that nut.

Your mention of "gdpr anonymous" doesn't really give much reassurance, as you can be GDPR compliant but still expose your users to de-anonymization.

If I’m not being paid cash for my location data, I’m not going to be excited to help Foursquare collect it, whether it's anonymous or not. Paying me in contextually-relevant advertisements and recommendations (cough exposure) will never be enough.

Would you do it for 10 bucks a year?

The companies make money because they have data for a lot of people, your individual location is not worth a lot as a result.

Yes I would. if you offer that to everyone, I doubt you would be profitable though.

No. The flat rate forces them to pay me when they don’t earn revenue and screws me when they earn too much revenue. The content publication industry worked out residuals years ago. They’ll need to do the same to earn my trust, and thus my location data.

Heh: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/california-gov-newsom-calls-...

As another person said, if Foursquare isn’t paying me, I would never find it cool. I am not impressed by data hoarding and creating cool visualizations to distract from foursquare’s true motive: money.

> if the source of the data was anonymous (as in gdpr anonymous, not “we use UUID instead of your name + SSN” anonymous) would you find it cooler?

I wouldn't, unless I could be convinced that the data was actually anonymized -- and considering that effective anonymization is actually a really hard problem to solve, that's a very high bar.

Not to mention that in the end, I'd have to take the company's word for it, which requires a high degree of trust to begin with.

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