From The New York Times
How Urban Anonymity Disappears When All Data Is Tracked
By Quentin Hardy
Cities are our paradises of anonymity, a place for both self-erasure and self-reinvention. But soon, cities may fall first in the disappearance, or at least a radical remaking, of privacy.
Information about our innocuous public acts is denser in urban areas, and can now be cheaply aggregated. Cameras and sensors, increasingly common in the urban landscape, pick up all sorts of behaviors. These are stored and categorized to draw personal conclusions — all of it, thanks to cheap electronics and cloud computing, for affordable sums.
“People in cities have anonymity from their neighbor, but not from an entity collecting data about them,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor at the I School at the University of California, Berkeley. “These are far more prevalent in cities.”...
That sense of where tech will take us is its own faith, Ms. Mulligan of Berkeley said. “There is an idea here that data is truth, and that’s not always true,” she said. “You may know who is running a red light, but you don’t know if there is a sick kid in the back seat, and they are racing to the hospital.”...