I Know Where You Were Last Summer: London's public bike data is telling everyone where you've been
This article is about a publicly available dataset of bicycle journey data that contains enough information to track the movements of individual cyclists across London, for a six month period just over a year ago. I'll also explore how this dataset could be linked with other datasets to identify the actual people who made each of these journeys, and the privacy concerns this kind of linking raises. -- It probably won't surprise you to learn that there is a publicly available Transport For London dataset that contains records of bike journeys for London's bicycle hire scheme. What may surprise you is that this record includes unique customer identifiers, as well as the location and date/time for the start and end of each journey. The public dataset currently covers a period of six months between 2012 and 2013. What are the consequences of this? It means that someone who has access to the data can extract and analyse the journeys made by individual cyclists within ...