It reminds me of how search engines know about things like shopping cart exploits right away because all of a sudden there are thousands and thousands of queries for a particular shopping cart software package being used on a web page.
Personally I agree with Matt that this is a not the usual kind of thing. Clearly Chipotle could anonymize their sales with dummy purchases but the actual numbers would still be there. Like a search engine, for the data stream (credit card charges) to work you are forced to put enough information in the transaction to identify it.
This is also something I see happening with IoT type technologies, when it becomes possible for someone to collect data on their own at thousands of locations for relatively small numbers of $, like the helicopters trying to estimate oil availability, you'll have data streams that can inform economic activity. Imagine something like a cellphone sized thing with a camera that just counts customers using OCV to note blobs at the counter, in a restaurant and texts a tally once an hour. Seems ridiculous but its quite possible to do, and much more cheaply than just repurposing disposed cell phones (although that works too).
Personally I agree with Matt that this is a not the usual kind of thing. Clearly Chipotle could anonymize their sales with dummy purchases but the actual numbers would still be there. Like a search engine, for the data stream (credit card charges) to work you are forced to put enough information in the transaction to identify it.
This is also something I see happening with IoT type technologies, when it becomes possible for someone to collect data on their own at thousands of locations for relatively small numbers of $, like the helicopters trying to estimate oil availability, you'll have data streams that can inform economic activity. Imagine something like a cellphone sized thing with a camera that just counts customers using OCV to note blobs at the counter, in a restaurant and texts a tally once an hour. Seems ridiculous but its quite possible to do, and much more cheaply than just repurposing disposed cell phones (although that works too).