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Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

> "General Electric has already made more than $1 billion dollars selling San Diego residents’ data to Wall Street"

Where does this figure come from? Is it even accurate at all? If this is actually true I'd be interested in seeing what kind of data they sell and who buys it. I'm really questioning the reliability of the article just because of this figure that seemingly just comes from nowhere.

Also, I live in San Diego, so I'm a little freaked out. This literally sounds like something out of 1984.

edit: I think they might be talking about Current, a GE subsidary that they sold to a wall street firm. Theres no financial figure disclosed. But it seems like they mainly do large-scale energy efficient lighting for commerical purposes. I would not classify that as 'selling data'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_(AIP_subsidiary)

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Yes, the links in the article point a GE Current site where the data was made available for hackathon projects: https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq/innovation-apps-cente...

Someone was even kind enough to hardcode the API access token in their open source project https://github.com/jonnjonny/WhereIsEveryone/blob/master/Whe...

A bit dated, but it seems that current has about a $1B total revenue overall (circa 2015). In my very cursorily search, I couldn't find any more specific data, but $1B total revenue from SD resident data seems a bit high to me (kudos to anyone however that can find more current data). Pure speculation, but perhaps the above article was talking about overall revenue and not only SD data revenue?

[1]. https://peprofessional.com/2019/04/aip-acquires-current-ge/

[2]. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/11/06/ge-to-sel...

This stuff is basically gold for Wall St. I don't do it anymore but when I worked in investment management, people were starting to look at counting footfall manually at scale (in retrospect, the edge ended up being huge). You can get similar data from other sources (e.g. credit card, satellite, etc.) but to be able to automate footfall counts would be pretty special (I know where I am, there were issues with automating this because no-one was interested in selling data and there was a possibility some data could count as non-public/material...a city doing this is pretty unique...that wouldn't happen here, city govt collecting data for HFs, wow).

It's a little difficult to parse meaning out of this article... a hit piece by a candidate for municipal office attempting to smear an incumbent with willful distortions.

If GE made $1B here (which I think is a total guess, stemming from American Industrial Partner's self-described focus on the middle market), it was from selling "corporation" not "data". "Wall St" in this case means PE not HF. There's a hand-wavy attempt to link this transaction to California DMV's sale of data, but the two cases aren't remotely similar.

The interesting part is actually the PDF of the San Diego "intelligent lighting" contract embedded in the article; they've highlighted the main points. Section 7 of the contract says that San Diego owns the raw data, while the vendor owns the processed data free & clear to do with as they please.

So this in no sense represents San Diego selling "footfall data" to HF, but it is somewhat eyebrow raising.

I also live in San Diego and see these cameras everywhere. I understand the reason for "safety" and other tech related improvements (I think they mention real time parking availability), but at what cost to private data. What I really want is data to back up all these claims.

Observation is useless if police aren't keen to taking effective action in the first place.

1 in a million crimes it is probably super useful, but for the 999,999 other times some people get into a fight, something gets stolen, two people get stabbed in a grocery store with many cameras and security guards and dozens of witnesses (using an example from my neighborhood in LA this past September), nothing happens because the perpetrators are long gone and will never be found by the time the cops show up, if they do at all. You can't effectively keep 500 square miles safe with only 9000 cops.

Interesting. Just doing the math let's say whomever bought it assumed they could it roll it out to 20 more cities. And they paid 2x revenue for it. That's 25M of implied revenue out of San Diego.

I guess you could divide by resident but multiple firms could purchase the same data, so hard to say how to think about it.

A company like Enron would probably love knowing detailed information about energy usage patterns.

That would be in the ballpark of $1000 per resident. Possible?

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