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Ban the sale of precise geolocation

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Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#161

Post by troupo »

em-bee wrote: post #31
troupo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR literally prohibits the sale of user data and tracking without user consent (because yes, you want to give people the possibility to opt in for a variety of reasons). GDPR has literally nothing to do with cookie popups. That was, and is, adtech

prohibits [...] without user consent that's what causes the popups. it should prohibit it outright, consent or not.

There are absolutely valid reasons for users to opt-in to tracking/data collection.

EU is first and foremost a capitalist economy which nevertheless tries to protect people from abuse. Who are they to forbid someone to collect data, and to someone to provide this data? Even things like quality surveys are collecting personal data.

However, adtech and tracking (also capitalists, (un)ironically) ruined everything for it for everyone.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#162

Post by hn_acker »

linkjuice4all wrote: post #43

Let’s just stretch copyright to cover movement/location as a protected creative expression. It’s somewhat ridiculous but we’ve already established case law and technology for handling/mishandling protected assets.

Cory Doctorow argued against using copyright law as a substitute for privacy law or labor law [1], and I argue the same for location privacy. Copyright law already gets abused enough in contexts that indisputably involve copying of creative work. I do not want to stretch copyright law into location/movement privacy, where nonconsensual recording of location/movement does not necessarily copy something created by the person whose location was tracked. At least in the US, copyright comes into existence when creative expression is recorded in a tangible medium (such as your device's RAM, because outside of my beloved meme world you cannot download more RAM), and the copyright belongs to whoever did the recording. If an app on your phone records your location, was it you who recorded it? Was it the phone maker who recorded it? Was it the app maker who recorded it? Keep in mind, maybe you didn't install the app, or maybe you weren't aware that the app would track your location when you first installed it.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-si...

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#164

Post by lithocarpus »

hightrix wrote: post #156
breppp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it would be hard to enslave these people through television

Would it be? I'd argue the current US administration is entirely propped up by television. Hell, the president seems to "rule" based on what Fox News said last night.

A slightly different and no more charitable perspective is that the people pulling the president's strings are the same people pulling Fox News's strings.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#165

Post by rockskon »

abustamam wrote: post #153
rockskon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as anonymized location data when you have the location of something where and when they sleep and work. It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells itself.

I think this begs the question of what anonymous data means. Sure my visit to HN is "anonymous" in that it doesn't say "abustamam visited this site" but piece together all the other visits that have my "anonymous ID" then eventually it paints a pretty nice picture of who I am.

Does it map to a single, identifiable person or something close enough that the distinction is meaningless?

Then it's not anonymous.

Simple as that.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#166

Post by xphos »

philipallstar wrote: post #107
xphos wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems hyperbolic we had logistics that functioned extremely well before we had customer location data for sale on 3rd party sites.

If you re-read the comment they didn't say that selling it was intrinsic.

The article is about privacy tracking spyware cookies. I think making statements in that context about how modern logistics don't work with out location data implies you mean location data from those sources. I mean i suppose it doesn't have to but than it just feels off topic no?

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#167

Post by philipnee »

ch4s3 wrote: post #3

IMO we should ban gathering this data without a warrant or specific contractual agreement between the device owner and entity aggregating the data. As much as congress loves to claim the interstate commerce theory of everything, this seems like a slam dunk.

companies don't buy anymore, they just take it. think about Claude, every time you use it, you are literally give away your code, your data, and even your personal information.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#168

Post by gwerbin »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #150
gwerbin wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What are your obligations under GDPR in that case? It's not like a packing machine can request data deletion.

No one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. I've seen the lawyers try to figure this out at a few companies. GDPR frames everything in the context of a person's data. There is no "person_id" or similar field in these data models. That isn't the purpose of the data, it would be expensive to extract it, and then it would create obvious liability under GDPR. This makes the idea of finding a p…

Let's say I'm an industrial monitoring SaaS company with a bunch of analytics products and a new AI intelligence product.

Forget tracking workers' movements and stuff like that because that's even more complicated (the data is tied to a person, but only in their capacity as an employee and not as a private individual).

Focus on a case like a cluster of sensors attached to various equipment powered by electric motors, or using RFID to detect when a pallet enters the warehouse. Let's say that all goes to a cloud platform and I store it, I build a bunch of derived analytics stuff from it, and I send it up to Anthropic (with no-train-on-me-pls contract clause) for my cool new AI insights engine.

Does GDPR apply at all to that? I would have assumed it doesn't have any relevance whatsoever, but you're implying that it does. Or are you specifically talking about the case when individual employees are the data collection subjects, like a fleet management platform with a telematics component?

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#169

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

wafflemaker wrote: post #130
mapt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think what Lavrenti Beria and an LLM could have done with that.

Somebody once said that if Stalin had access to television, he would never have to kill 20+ million ppl. What would he do with all that data? No idea.

Only thing better to rule with is a network connected telescreen that monitors and issues orders to the proles.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#170

Post by duxup »

It's frustrating how much of the system already is a hassle for everyone who already does the things right.

I make some apps that use precise location. We don't sell the data, we share it with the interested party who the app user is working for only. The user is fully aware when the data is collected and when not, they can even turn it off at will. Nobody even cares who has the device, just that they're delivering a package or something to that effect. It's all good.

Then I hit the app-stores and it's like pulling teeth with paperwork and rejections (depends on the reviewer, sometimes you fly through, sometimes very much not).

I have to attest that we don't do shit with an email that may or may not appear in a field, that we don't do porn (I have no idea where that reviewer got that idea). Some reviewer misread something and now I have to explain that no we don't use contacts, we never do... wtf. More delays.

I'm privacy minded so I don't so much mind the IDEA that I have to attest to all these things, but all the hoops I have to run through is because the bad guys who steal all this info and sell it do their thing, but they're still doing their bad thing just fine ...

Meanwhile my app is stuck in review.

It feels like being pulled over randomly by the cops because "well there's a lot of speeders out there" when I'm not one of them. It's all hassle for everyone doing it right, and for the bad guys or the apps that clearly don't have to follow the rules that everyone else does it has no impact on them.

The whole system is borked.

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