‘Creepy' NYC Law School Assignment Shows How Easy It Is to Find Strangers' Personal Info

A bench in a bustling public park used to be one of the most private places in the world. There’s a certain anonymity in being just one face in a crowd of hundreds. But big data and social media companies are changing what it means to be a stranger among strangers. That’s the lesson St. John’s Law School students learned this semester when Assistant Professor Kate Klonick assigned a peculiar – if not creepy – homework assignment. “One of the ideas that I had — to kind of teach some of my students how loose the norms are that protect a lot of our everyday privacy — was to give them an experiment to try to de-anonymize people using only their smartphones and Google and things they could overhear loudly in public,” Klonick said. The results of the assignment were startling to some of Klonick’s students.