A lot people got upset about Apple collecting location data on iPads and iPhones. The company just issued an update to the devices’ software in part to tamp down the reaction.
But that data could be as useful to regular people as it is to Apple.
Developers in The New York Times Company Research and Development Lab released a Web-based tool on Thursday that they hope will corral the location data Apple had been collecting and make it available to customers and researchers.
The Times Company’s Research Lab calls the project OpenPaths.cc, and describe it as a tool to “securely store, explore, and donate your iOS location data.”
People who participate in the project are asked to upload location information from their phone, which is then made anonymous and added to a database with the data from every other upload. People can then browse their own location data on an?interactive?map. At a later date researchers will be able request access to the collection of location uploads.
Michael Zimbalist, a company vice president and the director of the research lab (where I used to work), said his staff decided?to create the tool to help people recapture the data they have created and to get it into the hands of? researchers.
“When our personal data becomes accessible to us in a useful form, all kinds of things become possible,” said Mr. Zimbalist in an e-mail interview. “But more importantly, we can become active collaborators in the quest for solutions to important problems in fields such as public health, genetics and urban planning.”
“Data is becoming the exhaust product of daily life,” he said. “Yet much of the data we generate is inaccessible to us.”
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