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I’m watching you: Geographic Data and Your Privacy

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05/12/2010

Geographic information about you is easy to collect these days. When we carry around cell phones and give our our home address for everything, it makes it very easy for your location to get into the wrong hands.  Today you might not worry about someone finding you at your home, but when the need to arises, it may be too late. 

A new research study published online in the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal measures how easy it is to determine the identity of individuals using their geographical information.

In the article, Prof. Khaled El Emam, Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information and lead author, explains that they have developed a new method for measuring the privacy risk for Canadians, in particular, those living in small geographic areas. This privacy risk measure can then be used to decide whether it is appropriate to release/share geographic information or not and what demographics to include with this geographic information. The article also presents a set of criteria and checklists for managing the privacy risks when releasing/sharing location information. - Science Daily

Most people are not away of how much of their personal data is availble for anyone to find out.  For example, if you post your city and birthday on a social networking site, it is very easy for a stalker or any unwanted guest to track you down just based on that information.  Unless you have a very common name like Adam Smith, your name, city and birthday are enough information to locate you, especially if you live in a small town.  Some people don’t think twice about giving out their address and birthday at department stores with the promise to send you coupons.  Selling your address to junk mailers makes more money than those pair of panties every will.

Aside from the obvious, women especially should consider keeping their home address private to prevent possible future stalkers from locating them.  A study called the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAW) found that 8% of women and 2% of men have been stalked at some time during their lives.   1 out of every 12 women, and 1 out of every 45 men have reported being stalked during their lives.1  You might not be concerned now, but should you need to keep your home address safe, now is the time to start.

So what can you do?

  • Start by changing your phone numbers and email addresses.
  • Get a Post Office box that you can receive your mail at. Change all your home mail to your Post box
  • If asked to provide your home address simply state that you never give out your home address.  Use your PO box if necessary.
  • Remove your birthdate and hometown from all social networking sites and reconsider what kind of information you give out and who might have access to that information.  I opted to delete my social networking accounts because they were consuming too much of my time.  I also noticed that the people I used to keep in touch with via phone or email no longer did so because they could “keep tabs” on me through the social networking sites.  It seemed like an anti-social rather than a social method to me.
  • If you are really interested, google and yahoo search your name to see what other people might be able to find out about you via the web.  This might be shocking an unnerving.  Take down what you can and be informed.
  • If you live in an apartment, review the privacy policy with your landlord.  Make sure that he/she is not going to give out your name or personal information to a “flower delivery man” or “undeliverable package man”.  A stalker knows that by wearing a “uniform” he can solicit information from people like your landlord by making up a story.  Change your name on your call box if necessary by simply using your middle name as your first or just using your first name with last initial.  By the time you realize you are being stalked, your stalked might have already solicited information from your landlord if you haven’t had the privacy discussion with him/her.
  • Educate yourself on how to defend yourself.  Take a self defense class, get a conceal and carry license, anything to prepare yourself should you need to defend yourself.

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1 Tjaden, P., & Theonnes, N. (1998). Stalking in American: Findings from the national violence against women survey. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice. NCJ Report No. NCJ 169592.