What Google knows
It's actually quite useful to have this data, especially if it's correlated with some richer information. For example, I've consulted the data to answer questions like, "Where was that awesome sandwich place I ate at last month?" It's also extremely useful to be able to share this data with Google because it allows me to quickly cross-reference location coordinates with Google's database of businesses and addresses. You can also download your complete location history in one giant blob (just ignore the warning that the History map only displays 500 datapoints, and download the KML file). Once you have the KML file, you can do whatever you want with it. For example, I uploaded mine to Indiemapper to map my wanderings for the last six months (Indiemapper is cool, but I quickly found that this dataset is really much too big for a Flash-based web application).
Not surprisingly, I spent most of my time in California, mostly in Davis and the Bay Area, with a few trips to Los Angeles via I-5, the Coast Starlight, and the San Joaquin (the density of points along those routes is indicative of the data service along the way).
The national map shows my trip to visit my dad's family in New Jersey and Massachusetts, as well as a layover in Denver that I'd completely forgotten about.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this dataset. On one hand, it's very useful to have, and sharing it with my friends and with Google is very useful. It's also cool to have this sort of quantitative insight into my recent past so easily accessible. On the other hand, I'm not particularly happy with the idea that Google controls this data. I chose the word controls deliberately. I don't mind that they have the data -- after all, I did give it to them. As far as I know, Google has been a good citizen when it comes to keeping personal location data confidential. The Latitude documentation makes their policy pretty clear :
So, that's what they'll do with it, and I'm happy with that. What bothers me is this: Who owns this data?Privacy
Google Location History is an opt-in feature that you must explicitly enable for the Google Account you use with Google Latitude. Until you opt in to Location History, no Latitude location history beyond your most recently updated location if you aren't hiding is stored for your account. Your location history can only be viewed when you're signed in to your Google Account.You may delete your location history by individual location, date range, or entire history. Keep in mind that disabling Location History will stop storing your locations from that point forward but will not remove existing history already stored for your Google Account.
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If I delete my history, does Google keep a copy or can I recover it?
No. When you delete any part of your location history, it is deleted completely and permanently within 24 hours. Neither you nor Google can recover your deleted location history.
This question leads directly to one of the most scorchingly controversial questions you could ask for, and there are profound legal, social, economic and moral outcomes riding on how we answer it. This isn't just about figuring out what coffee shops I like. If you want to see how high the stakes go, buy one of 23andMe's DNA tests. You're giving them access to perhaps the most personal dataset imaginable. In fairness, 23andMe has a very strong confidentiality policy.
But therein lays the problem -- it's a policy. Ambiguous or fungible confidentiality policies are at the heart of an increasing number of lawsuits and public snarls. For example, there is the case of the blood samples taken from the Havasupai Indians for use in diabetes research that turned up in research on schizophrenia. The tribe felt insulted and misled, and sued Arizona State University (the case was recently settled, the tribe prevailing on practically every item).
You can't mention informed consent and not revisit HeLa, the first immortal human cells known to science. HeLa was cultured from a tissue biopsy from Henrietta Lacks and shared among thousands of researchers -- even sold as a commercial product -- making her and her family one of the most studied humans in medical history. The biopsy, the culturing, the sharing and the research all happened without her knowledge or consent, or the knowledge or consent of her family.
And, of course, there is Facebook -- again. Their new "Instant Personalization" feature amounts to sharing information about personal relationships and cultural tastes with commercial partners on an op-out basis. Unsurprisingly, people are pissed off.
Some types of data are specifically protected by statute. If you hire a lawyer, the data you share with them is protected by attorney-client privilege, and cannot be disclosed even by court order. Conversations with a psychiatrist are legally confidential under all but a handful of specifically described circumstances. Information you disclose to the Census cannot be used for any purpose other than the Census. Nevertheless, there are many types of data that have essentially no statutory confidentiality requirements, and these types of data are becoming more abundant, more detailed, and more valuable.
While I appreciate Google's promises, I'm disturbed that the only thing protecting my data is the goodwill of a company. While a company might be full of a lots of good people, public companies are always punished for altruistic behavior sooner or later. There is always a constituency of assholes among shareholders who believe that the only profitable company is a mean company, an they'll sue to get their way. Managers must be very mindful of this fact as they navigate the ever changing markets, and so altruistic behavior in a public company can never be relied upon.
We cannot rely on thoughtful policies, ethical researchers or altruistic companies to keep our data under our control. The data we generate in the course of our daily lives is too valuable, and the incentives for abuse are overwhelming. I believe we should go back to the original question -- who owns this data? -- and answer it. The only justifiable answer is that the person described by the data owns the data, and may dictate the terms under which the data may be used.
People who want the data -- advertisers, researchers, statisticians, public servants -- fear that relinquishing their claim on this data will mean that they will lose it. I strongly disagree. I believe that people will share more freely if they know they can change their mind, and that the law will back them up.
Update
The EFF put together a very sad timeline of Facebook's privacy policies as they've evolved from 2005 to now. They conclude, depressingly :Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.
The Davis Crash Map
In particular, this is map is intended to examine bicycle accidents. I hope people will look at this map, and think about how they behave on the roads, weather on foot, on a bicycle, or in a car. How you behave on the road has direct, and sometimes dire, consequences for you and for other people.
However, there is more to this than behavior. This is also a design question. Roads are not natural features. They are designed and built by people for use by people. As with anything that is made by humans, there are good designs and bad designs. These designs have a real impact on peoples' lives. In the case of streets, the impact on your life can be very literal, as this map shows.
Even good designs can always be improved. Davis is a pretty safe town in which to walk, bicycle and drive. But if you study this map, and think about it as you go about the town, it's also clear that things could be better.
I'm not a traffic engineer, or a civil engineer, or a city planner. I claim no expertise in those areas. I'll leave it to other people to make specific suggestions. However, I think it is important for the users of streets -- pretty much everybody -- to think about what kind of streets they want. This map should help give you a better idea of what kind of streets we actually have.
For some reason, people seem to get very emotional about traffic. I grew up in Los Angeles, home of the nation's worst traffic jams. Perhaps this is to make up for our lack of a professional football franchise. Passions about transportation, especially mundane things like parking spaces and HOV lanes, get people really worked up. Los Angeles is also famous for road rage, and nowhere is it in greater evidence than in the corridors of City Hall. Public meetings on traffic can make I-405 look like afternoon tea. In fact, thousands of people from all over the world tune into the internet broadcast of the Santa Monica city council meetings to listen to Californians scream at each other over the exact position of little blobs of paint on little strips of asphalt.
What the conversation needs, I think, is some perspective. Data can help provide that perspective, especially if it can be represented in a way that is easy to understand. Maps are good at that.
If you will indulge me, I'd like to share my perspective on this data. Each marker represents a traumatic event for someone. Under some of those markers, a life came to a sudden, violent end. I'd like to share a picture of what kind of event a marker on this map represents. You won't find a marker for this event because it happened in Norman, Oklahoma, a college town that is a lot like Davis.
Anna and me
In October of 2007, my little sister was riding her bicycle near her house. A lady in a Mercedes made a lazy left turn, and crossed onto the wrong side of the road. She hit Anna head-on. Anna went up and over the hood of the car, and face-planted on the windshield, breaking her nose and her front teeth. The lady slammed on the breaks, and Anna then went flying off the car and slammed her head on the pavement. That much is clear from where my mother photographed the tire marks, the blood stains, and scattered teeth.
Who designed this street, anyway?
The sequence of events afterward are a little unclear, since Anna does not remember anything from that day, or for several days before and after the accident. The police report includes several details that are impossible or don't make any sense; for example, the officer thought she was coming out of a driveway onto the street, but the driveway did not belong to anyone she knew, and was paved in gravel (extremely annoying to bicycle on). The report also places the accident on the wrong side of the street, which was obvious enough based on the tire marks and blood. Based on what her friends say she was doing -- biking from her house to a friend's house -- she would have just been pedaling along the side of the road. The details of what happened are somewhat unclear, other than the evidence left on the road and gouged onto my sister's face.
After hitting the pavement, she evidently got up and staggered around for a bit, and then collapsed. She stopped breathing, and officer on the scene couldn't find a pulse, and assumed that she was dead. This was the reason given for not immediately summoning an ambulance.
Then she suddenly revived and started mumbling. The lady who ran her down went into screaming hysterics, and had to be restrained (or evacuated, or something). It was only then that an ambulance was called. From the report, it appears that paramedics and police spent a good deal of time tending to the driver of the car, who was having an anxiety attack, instead of Anna, who was bleeding from massive head trauma.
Anna then spent the next several days in the hospital. My mother got on the next flight to stay with her. For the next several days, Anna went through long and short memory lapses and dizzy spells of various lengths. When I spoke to her on the phone over the next several days, she also had some kind of aphasia, which was very jarring to me because she is normally a very articulate person. And then there was the puking. Brain injuries often come with a heavy dose of overpowering nausea. She was on anti-nausea drugs for a long time after the accident.
It took a long time for he to start feeling "normal" again. Almost two years later, she's still not sure she feels completely normal. Fortunately, thanks to some really great work by her surgeons, she looks normal. Needless to say, she is both very lucky and very tough.
Anna's bicycle. The police kept it as evidence, but allowed my mother to photograph it.
You could say that I have a personal stake in this, and I will not claim to be unbiased. Many people who argue against safety measures that would slow traffic argue their case on the basis of personal responsibility. We are each responsible for our actions, they argue, and if you do something stupid, you are responsible for the consequences. Why should people who don't do stupid things be inconvenienced?
I agree completely. However, if one casts any real issue into the frame of personal responsibility, then things are rarely so simple. Everyone who could act in a situation has responsibilities, even if they are not they are directly involved. When you have the power to prevent something bad from happening, and you choose not to act, then some of the responsibility falls on you. Every unfortunate, stupid thing that happens involves a cast of thousands of silent, but not blameless, bystanders.
We have a responsibility to at least attempt to protect people regardless of what they are doing -- even if it is stupid. This is especially true when it comes to the things we build. We shouldn't, if we can possibly avoid it, build things that injure and kill people. If we can think of ways to make something we build less dangerous, we ought to give it a try.
Anna and Earnie, about a year after the accident.
My little sister was stupid not to wear a helmet that day. The lady in the car was stupid not to have been on the lookout for cyclists. But neither of them deserved what happened. Each of them is obviously bears some measure of responsiblity (and I have my own opinions on how those measures are apportioned), but the city of Norman also is also responsible. The city didn't even bother to paint a line down the middle of the road; what was the driver supposed to be on the wrong side of?
Yes, this is about personal responsibility. We, the public, build the roads. We are responsible for the markers on this map, and all the terror, trauma and tragedy they represent. Let's try to do better.
Bike saftey in Davis
This is for 168 bicycle accidents that happened between 2004 and 2006. I have a lot more data, but 95% of the work in this little project involves parsing and renormalizing it. Evidently, police reports are not written with data processing in mind! I suppose that makes perfect sense. An officer at the scene of an accident probably has things on her mind besides generating a nice, easy to parse data point for future analysis. The priority seems to be completeness, rather than consistency. My parsing code, for example, has to be able to correctly detect and calculate distances measured in units of "feeet".
I'll release the applet here once I make an interface for it (and get the rest of the data imported). Stay tuned.
Fun with My Tracks, an accident, and Biking in Davis
After wandering off the Bike Loop a bit, I decided to head home. I was biking down Russell Blvd., and I witnessed a very scary car accident. The accident happened where I stopped recording the track, at the red marker. A guy in a cherried-out lifted F-150 was sitting at the traffic light (that's the point where I turned around). When the light turned green, he floored it. According to the other witnesses, he was racing with someone, or trying to catch someone who had cut him off. I couldn't see the other car because it was behind his gigantic stupid truck.
What I did see, though, was that he accelerated continuously until he reached the next intersection (the red marker), where he had a head-on collision with a girl in a 1990's Honda Civic trying to make a left turn. His engine was deafeningly loud even a block away, and I heard it roaring and down-shifting right up until the crash.
Looking at the damage to her car, it looked like he basically ran it over. The lift kit on the truck put his undercarriage about level with her roof, and there were even little ladders installed to climb up to the doors. After he ran over the Civic, he swerved around a bit, jumped the median, sideswiped a small SUV in the oncoming traffic, spun 180 degrees, and snapped his axle. When the axle snapped, I heard his engine redline for half a second and then cut.
Happily, nobody was hurt. The girl in the Civic was pretty much petrified, though. She was convinced that the accident was her fault because she didn't get out of the way.
I told her this was nonsense; the truck was going more than double the speed limit, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have his lights on (it was dusk, but not completely dark yet). She asked me about five times, "How much do you think it will cost to fix?" I told her, "Cost you? Nothing. He was committing maybe a dozen moving violations, and probably racing someone. His insurance company will probably be so happy not to have to pay medical bills that they will buy you a whole new car."
Maybe she could have been a little swifter completing her turn, but it's a busy street and there is a lot of pedestrian and bicycle traffic (it parallels a bike path). Making a quick turn is probably not a good idea. Or, maybe she could have waited until this asshole passed, but, as I pointed out, he was going maybe 50 or 60 in a 30 zone, and accelerating. She timed her turn right for reasonable traffic flow, but didn't account for total maniacs among the oncoming traffic. It would have been difficult to judge when he would reach the intersection she was turning through.
Oi!
As it turns out, Davis has been thinking about redesigning this stretch of Russell Blvd. for several years. If you look at the proposed design, it would have made this accident impossible or unlikely. You can't race on a one lane road, and a landscaped medium would have prevented the second collision.
GPS!
In truth, I actually don't have a bad sense of direction. I have a bad sense of timing. I usually know exactly where I am going and how to get there, but I often don't realize where I am in time to make the right turns.
Fortunately, one thing I am not going to do in Beijing is drive. I'm not particularly worried about the drivers in Beijing, though. I spent many years driving in Boston on a daily basis, so the belligerence, recklessness, carelessness and stupidity of other drivers is something I've grown expect. Rather, I refuse to drive in Beijing because cars are rolling legal time-bombs. Almost every aspect of a normal automotive experience is intimately tangled with litigation, prosecution and/or the potentiality of litigation and prosecution. Automobiles are pretty much the only means by which a normal person can accidentally break the law. It's practically inevitable, in fact.
So, I'm sure as hell not going to risk driving a car in a country that doesn't have an independent judiciary. I don't care how careful or how reckless the drivers are. It's much more likely that you will make a mistake leading to an accident than for someone else to randomly hit you, especially over a short period of time. So, if I wind up in court, I'd prefer it weren't a kangaroo court.
Anyway, the GPS unit is a Garmin nüvi 660. Evidently Costco had a fantastic deal, because when he offered to buy me a GPS system, I suggested something much less extravagant.
The device is actually quite friendly for Linux users. When plugged into a USB port, the device simply shows up as a (rather large) mass storage device. The "interface" consists of a bunch of folders into which you may put stuff (e.g., MP3s, audio books, images, et cetera). If you wish to upgrade the firmware, you just plop the firmware file into the right directory and reboot the device. It also works as a standard Bluetooth hands-free unit, and has a very, very good speaker phone. So, if you have taken the trouble of making Bluetooth hands-free units work on Linux, then the nüvi 660 will work fine.
Garmin also helpfully placed the manuals on the device as searchable PDF files. It's a good idea; if you have the device, you have the manuals too. I think this is probably the future of technical documentation and bundled software. Why not just integrate a flash drive into the device? The cost of a 128 MB of flash and a USB interface could barely be more than the cost of printing and distributing manuals and CDROMS (never mind the extra cost of technical support for when those items are lost).
The only downside of the nüvi 660 is that there doesn't seem to be a way of pulling real-time GPS data off of it. When you connect by Bluetooth, it will always show up as an audio device. When you connect by USB, it always shows up as a mass storage device. There doesn't seem to be a way of telling it to be a serial GPS. I may be incorrect on this point, but I have not yet found an option that would make this possible. It is already a pretty sophisticated device,though. I don't see why Garmin couldn't add that functionality in a firmware release...
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