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@Daniel "This data is about the system, not the people. In fact, there is nothing personally identifiable in the files."

Goldfish makes a good point that this may not come under the scope of what the PII laws are striving to prevent(i.e., identity theft), but if you subsitute 'protecting privacy' for 'protecting one's identity from theft', there are parallels between the two. And the one I have been trying to make understood today is that non-primary data can be used to derive primary data ... when one is able to 'connect the lines' .... So while nothing being disseminated is apparently personally identifiable, if it can be used in conjunction with other data to identify an individual and their normal patterns of travel (or even their one off travel in the past), then that is information which needs to be sheilded from release. And I think the others on here have done a pretty good job of explaining what CaBi is releasing can indeed be used to identify an individuals past trips or pattern of trips.

As others have offered, releasing this data at an aggregated level (e.g., departures per quarter hour at a specific station) would solve this problem. Additionally, just throwing uninterpreted (fully foot-noted) data out there serves no ones interests. It's as bad as when that guy a while back was tweeting cycling and pedestrian incidents in the District. Anyone with the money to buy a calculator could 'derive' just about any conclusion they wanted from the data ... which made it basically valueless. I suspect your going to see the same problem here with respect to the CaBi data. And at possibly great cost to some individuals who will be paying for this with their privacy (at the best case.)

by Lance on Jan 12, 2012 1:11 pm • link • report

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