Anonymized data as a concept has always been a joke. With enough data points, the origin can usually be traced.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Anonymized data as a concept has always been a joke. With enough data points, the origin can usually be traced.
The design goal of anonimized data is that it is processed to explicitly disallow tracing. This means not only removing personally identifiable information but also disallow session data.
But the data itself can and does lead to tracking. Personalized online advertising isn't decided by magic.
Depends. Eg: If the goal is to show data about which vendors at a sports game got the most traffic, you can easily share data about how many people went to which vendor, and at which times, without there being any possibility to identify Joe getting a fifth hot dog.
If enough information about the original person is destroyed, it cannot be recreated. Just like how you can't enhance a picture like they do in those serialized crime shows.
But the data itself can and does lead to tracking.
I'm not sure how to express it any clearer: anonimized info, by definition and by design, does not and cannot lead to tracking.
I'm not sure I'm expressing this in clear terms. The same company is collecting data and anonymizing it. They have people dedicated to review which data a service is designed to store, to classify that data according to their privacy implications, and to anonymize all data they have in order to comply with all sorts of legislation.
If the data they are collecting isn't anonymous, or could be deanonimized, they are liable to pay huge fines and suffer other painful legal consequences.
This is not about hypothetical scenarios where you can argue that tracking random brower fingerprints can pinpoint who you are. This is about a single company having to legally demonstrate they do not directly or indirectly abuse personally identifiable information, otherwise they have to pay a fortune in fines for no good reason.
Does Amazon pay well enough to justify staying there? Isn't it one of the most parsimonious and cut-throat company out there? Make billions but pay their workers shit, is what I came to hear, but dunno how true that is.
Their workers are actually paid decent wages. It's just that Amazon also tries extracting every ounce of productivity they can from them.
Yeah I've always heard that Amazon pays quite well. The only issue is that they'd work you to death in their warehouses if possible. It's a job that's good for quick cash but should never be a career.
Does Amazon pay well enough to justify staying there?
That's hard to tell, because everyone tends to stick with the best job they could have.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The new badge report for individual employees is a reversal from Amazon's previous policy of only tracking anonymized, aggregated office attendance data, which it said was shared with managers, primarily for safety and space planning purposes.
For example, at a recent internal townhall meeting, Amazon's SVP Peter DeSantis told his engineering team that office badging data is "informational" and only shared in "very aggregated ways," as Insider previously reported.
In an email to Insider, Amazon's spokesperson Rob Munoz said badge data does not account for reported paid-time off, personal time, or work from a non-corporate building.
The memo added badge data is not available to employees in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Korea, or Taiwan.
"We're providing this data to help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues," said the memo, obtained by Insider.
Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy, meanwhile, told employees in an internal meeting last month that it's "past" the time to commit to the company's RTO policy, saying "it's probably not going to work out" for those refusing to comply.
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