Live data from Hacker News

Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

motherboard.vice.com

181–190 of 253 posts

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests. Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist. The Data Protection Directive, which the GDPR merely extends and updates, is older than Google and almost as old as the web itself, and was an attempt to unify even older national laws regarding personal data. It's not a reaction to having "lost" the privacy-eroding race.

European politicians don’t have to spend 70% of their time begging corporations for campaign donation. I believe this is much more of a determining factor.

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is kind of our own fault, though. Judging by the sentiment on HN when GDPR was coming into effect, if something like it came up for a vote in the US, a lot of HN users and other tech people would vote against it. There was no shortage of angry geeks posting articles about their service turning away EU users rather than complying with GDPR.

If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests. Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

Not all tech comes from slinging ads.

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#183
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you work in tech or marketing your salary comes from eroding privacy. There is a lot of money at stake here and people don't vote against their interests. Europeans aren't inherently better: if Facebook and Google were companies founded in Germany or France who knows if GDPR would exist.

Hi I work for a printing company as a full-stack developer. My work involves things like writing API wrappers to ingest order flow so our customers can print brochures, or building web UI tools to create and order print resources. The last algorithm I wrote was to generate 5000 unique BINGO cards. Please explain to me how my salary comes from eroding privacy.

I think we can agree that what you do and what your salary "come from" can be distinct and can be influenced by other things. There are engineers at FB whose sole job is maintaining REACT.js but they are paid from the money made from selling data.

Further, and I want to make it clear that I don't mean this as a value statement, but is a printing company what most of us really think of a the "tech" industry? and by extension does that really make you the subject of what you are replying to?

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#184
post #56

I think we need to reassess how we treat data generated by users via phones, devices and our digital activities. We had the concept of private and public property long before intellectual property became codified by law. I believe that we are entering a new phase which may require the development of a new type of jurisprudence around things like location data. I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I'm starting to believe…

How about we start with not allowing people to legally kidnap individuals? I never understood the whole concept of “bounty hunters” in the US it’s not the Wild West anymore. The problem here is that “fugitive recovery” doesn’t need to meet any of the standards normal law enforcement does and unless they kill someone or injure bystanders there likely won’t be an investigation into their conduct and even if there is on…

The Fugitive: Evidence on Public Versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18862432

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#185
post #122

Criminal investigations have to stand up to court scrutiny. Fugitive recoveries do not. I expect there’s a lot more misconduct where this came from.

The whole bounty hunter system sounds like something out of a bad movie.. I would be very surprised if it wasn't full of abuse stories.

Obligatory Dale Gribble (from King of the Hill) Reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxcOf9nwwKE

"You're telling me there's a poorly trained, quasi-legal police force that operates with few, if any government controls? ... It's about time."

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid giving your mobile number to service providers on sign up (banks, paypal, uber etc)?

Google voice works fine for that... I do the same. It's wonderful.

Google voice used to work fine, but I've found increasingly a number of the more "serious" institutions like banks have been rejecting VoIP numbers like Google Voice occasionally. If I can recall correctly I also believe that many of the chat applications reject numbers that are not tied directly to a SIM as well. I have used my GV since it was still invite only and have had to give out my real number increasingly often.

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#187
post #56

I think we need to reassess how we treat data generated by users via phones, devices and our digital activities. We had the concept of private and public property long before intellectual property became codified by law. I believe that we are entering a new phase which may require the development of a new type of jurisprudence around things like location data. I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I'm starting to believe…

“We had the concept of private and public property”

maybe in the western world. in a lot of other places the whole “privacy” thing is fuzzy.

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is supposed to need a warrant post- Carpenter : https://www.lawfareblog.com/summary-supreme-court-rules-carp...

Thanks for that. The point I'm trying to make is that they create the framework for this stuff in seemingly obvious and necessary laws and regulations. Then, when it's needed, "Well look-a here! Good thing we forced that other unrelated thing. That's a nice personal locator you've got there." Meaning: Thanks to e911, a seemingly perfectly acceptable requirement, we now carry around devices that can be used to locate…

Phone companies were able to triangulate phones before e911, right? e911 just makes it mandatory to have the triangulation hardware/software actually deployed and linked up with 911 call centers, but (GPS aside) I would have thought telcos could have done that on their own with or without e911.

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#189
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we start with not allowing people to legally kidnap individuals? I never understood the whole concept of “bounty hunters” in the US it’s not the Wild West anymore. The problem here is that “fugitive recovery” doesn’t need to meet any of the standards normal law enforcement does and unless they kill someone or injure bystanders there likely won’t be an investigation into their conduct and even if there is on…

> How about we start with not allowing people to legally kidnap individuals? Then you'd have to give up being able to afford bail; without bounty hunters, bondsman would have no recourse when you didn't show up to court and thus not much incentive to loan you bail money. You're not being legally kidnapped, you agreed to those terms when you borrowed the bond money for bail.

Perhaps other legal systems exist around the world which have been able to deal with this over the course of history?

Re: Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is kind of our own fault, though. Judging by the sentiment on HN when GDPR was coming into effect, if something like it came up for a vote in the US, a lot of HN users and other tech people would vote against it. There was no shortage of angry geeks posting articles about their service turning away EU users rather than complying with GDPR.

This is a double edged sword...in the EU it doesn't matter because they didn't have a internet economy to begin with but here in the US a lot is at stake. So if you want better privacy laws in the US then they have to be much more clever than GDPR to not destroy the economy and global competitiveness! BTW: Personally I think it is possible to do better than GDPR here in the US.

As a percentage of GDP the so-called "digital economy" isn't much less in the EU than in the U.S. See, e.g., https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/PP/2018/02281...

Excluding the U.K. and Ireland (tax haven) the difference between the EU and U.S. is greater, but (eyeballing) only on the order of 30-50%--e.g. ~4% vs ~6%.

What's more surprising is how small the share of GDP is the digital economy in the U.S.

That said, "digital economy" may be a poor proxy for understanding the impact of privacy regulations. It's a superset of tech industries, including much more than those parts which broker private information and to that extent would overestimate the impact. OTOH, I presume "digital economy" excludes large parts of non-tech industries (i.e. traditional sales and marketing companies, TV and newspaper ads, etc) and thus underestimates the potential impact.

Post reply on HN