'Privacy Protecting' Car Location Data Seemingly Shows Where People Live, Work, and Go
On Friday February 19th, someone drove past the Lake Merced Golf Club, along freeway 280, and were outside the Dignity Health-GoHealth Urgent Care facility. But their car was most frequently parked outside a specific address in the fancy Noe Valley area of San Francisco.
I know this because a company called Otonomo sells the granular location data of vehicles across the United States and the rest of the world. Otonomo also makes some of its location data available as part of a free trial. The data is supposed to be pseudonymous, linked only to a non-descript identifier for the car, but Motherboard found it is relatively easy to find who a car potentially belongs to and follow their movements. A source pulled data from Otonomo en masse and provided Motherboard with GPS coordinates of drivers in California, Berlin, and other cities, and that data can be mapped to track unsuspecting drivers wherever they go, and to determine their likely home addresses and identities.
The news highlights the nascent market of vehicle location data, tapped into by insurance firms, advertisers, and others who can obtain it. Government contractors have also offered to sell such data to the U.S. military for surveillance purposes. The experiment shows how fragile the anonymity of location data can be, with one of the few barriers being an agreement in Otonomo's terms of use to not try and unmask real people in the data.
