{"id":1154,"date":"2010-08-24T06:56:08","date_gmt":"2010-08-24T14:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1154"},"modified":"2015-01-04T16:46:52","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T22:46:52","slug":"non-personal-information-like-where-you-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=1154","title":{"rendered":"Non-Personal Information – like where you live?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I\u00a0gave a presentation\u00a0at PII 2010 in Seattle<\/a> where I tried to summarize what I had learned from my recent work on WiFi location services and identity.\u00a0\u00a0During the question period\u00a0 an audience member asked me to return to the slide where I recounted how I had first<\/a> encountered Apple’s new location tracking policy:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My questioner was clearly a bit irritated with me,\u00a0 Didn’t I realize that the “unique device identifier” was just a\u00a0GUID – a purely random number?\u00a0\u00a0It wasn’t a MAC address.\u00a0 It was not personally identifying.<\/p>\n

The question really perplexed me, since I had just shown a slide demonstrating how if you go to this well-known web site<\/a> (for example) and enter a location you find out who lives there (I used myself as an example, and by\u00a0the way, “whitepages” releases this information even though I have had an unlisted number…).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I pointed out the obvious:\u00a0 if\u00a0Apple\u00a0releases your location and a GUID\u00a0to a third party on\u00a0multiple occasions, one location will soon stand out as being your residence… Then presto, if\u00a0the third pary\u00a0looks up\u00a0the address in a “Reverse Address”\u00a0search engine, the “random” GUID identifies you personally<\/strong> forever more.\u00a0 The notion that location information tied to random identifiers is not personally identifiable information is total hogwash.<\/p>\n

My questioner then asked, “Is your problem that Apple’s privacy policy is so clear?\u00a0\u00a0Do you prefer companies who\u00a0don’t publish a privacy policy at all, but rather just take your information without telling you?”\u00a0\u00a0A chorus of groans seemed to answer\u00a0his question to everyone’s satisfaction.\u00a0 But I personally found the question thought provoking.\u00a0 I assume\u00a0corporations publish privacy policies – even those as duplicitous as Apple’s – because they have to.\u00a0 I need to learn more about why.<\/p>\n

[Meanwhile, if you’re wondering how I could possibly post my own residential address on my blog, it turns out I’ve moved and it is no longer my address.\u00a0 Beyond that, the initial “A” in the listing above\u00a0has nothing to do with my real name – it’s just a mechanism I use to track who has given out my personal information.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The notion that location information tied to random identifiers is not personally identifiable information is total hogwash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,71,2,81,40,11,77],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1409,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions\/1409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}