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Ban the sale of precise geolocation

lawfaremedia.org

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Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#171

Post by JumpCrisscross »

microtonal wrote: post #55
ch4s3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR like all EU regulation is needlessly complicated and aimed at a compliance model that seems designed for SAP.

The compliance model is very simple. Do not collect data. Problem solved. If you need to collect data (e.g. because you are a webshop), only collect the minimum necessary. The problem is not the GDPR, the problem is the surveillance industry that wants to grab as much data as possible and try to do as much malicious compliance as possible.

> compliance model is very simple. Do not collect data. Problem solved

In a perfect world, yes. In the real world, there is an entire industry of lawyers who will smother your competitors with bogus requests because GDPR requires you spend time and resources to investigate and respond to each and every complaint regardless of merit.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#172

Post by rubyfan »

rcxdude wrote: post #144
nickburns wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP states correctly that they believe the default 'choice' of a user should be 'opting- out ' of location tracking.

This is utterly confusing the use of the terms. Opting is making a choice. The default isn't a choice. Opting by default makes no sense.

Yeah it is. What I mean is the default is you have not opted in. You must choose to opt in for this type of tracking. It should be a choice that doesn’t preclude you from using a service if you don’t allow tracking.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#173

Post by foresto »

davebren wrote: post #50
glitchc wrote: post #32

How about we just ban the collection of precise geolocation? Wouldn't that be a better solution?

You can have legitimate use cases where it's a core functionality of the application to store it, so the user obviously knows it's being collected and agrees by using it.

Storage accessible only to the user is usually not what we mean when we say data collection.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#174

Post by [deleted] »

nickburns wrote: post #64
gruez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think we should make this type of tracking opt-out by default That's opt-in, not opt-out. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opt-out

GP states correctly that they believe the default 'choice' of a user should be 'opting- out ' of location tracking.

[deleted]

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#175

Post by totetsu »

teraflop wrote: post #70
Johnbot wrote: post #9

A lot of geolocation data on the market is anonymized, following medium-lived unique IDs that aren't able to be mapped to other identifiers. The problem with that is that if you have precise locations, or enough samples that you can apply statistics to find precise locations, in many cases you can de-anonymize the IDs. You can purchase address and resident listings from a number of different data vendors, and by chec…

We should have learned this lesson 20 years ago when researchers were able to deanonymize a lot of the Netflix Prize dataset, which contained nothing except movie ratings and their associated dates. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105 If movie ratings are vulnerable to pattern-matching from noisy external sources, then it should be obvious that location data is enormously more vulnerable.

> In contrast to previous attacks on micro-data privacy [22], our de-anonymization algorithm does not assume that the attributes are divided a priori into quasi-identifiers and sensitive attributes. Examples include anonymized transaction records (if the adversary knows a few of the individual's purchases, can he learn all of her purchases?), recommendation and rating services (if the adversary knows a few movies that the individual watched, can he learn all movies she watched?), Web browsing and search histories (12], and so on. In such datasets, it is impossible to tell in advance which attributes might be available to the adversary;

Is Location data highly dimensional though?

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#176

Post by abustamam »

rockskon wrote: post #165
abustamam wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that even completely anonymous data that conforms to what you just said can easily become de-anonymized when contextualized to other "anonymous" data.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#177

Post by quantum_magpie »

rubyfan wrote: post #172
rcxdude wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is utterly confusing the use of the terms. Opting is making a choice. The default isn't a choice. Opting by default makes no sense.

Yeah it is. What I mean is the default is you have not opted in. You must choose to opt in for this type of tracking. It should be a choice that doesn’t preclude you from using a service if you don’t allow tracking.

You are describing opt-in policies — you’re out by default and you have to opt-in to be tracked.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#178

Post by heavyset_go »

romaniv wrote: post #41

The problem with all these discussions about banning stuff is that privacy is always on the back foot. It's by design. People who want to surveil and manipulate us are actively investigating new ways of doing it, they get paid for it and they risk nothing in the long run. All of these discussions about specifics are just reactions. They aren't even reactions to the surveillance itself, but rather to a discovery by so…

A culture that values privacy, out of respect, necessity and/or fear, has potential to sabotage each step of the process even if it were not to change.

There was a point, at least in my bubble, where there was a general sense that government surveillance is bad (expect against those people). I think coming out of the Cold War, then 9/11, and followed by propaganda obfuscating the increase, purpose and prevalence of private surveillance took us from "no, we aren't Stalinist Russia" to "I don't care, I have nothing to hide" to just "I don't care" when it comes to the topic of surveillance at all.

Unfortunately, it will take great shocks to instill it so the next generation can learn from the suffering of the previous, and then forget it when privacy is taken for granted again.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#179

Post by rockskon »

abustamam wrote: post #176
rockskon wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that even completely anonymous data that conforms to what you just said can easily become de-anonymized when contextualized to other "anonymous" data.

A marketer's definition of anonymized is worthless. It's a fantasy they want everyone else to believe in.

If it can be "de-anonymized" then it was never anonymous to begin with.

"De-anonymized" is quite literally an oxymoron.

Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation

#180

Post by drysine »

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.

I'm no fun of Stalin, but this meme about 20+ million victims needs to be purged.

"The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.

Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, some 390,000[ deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility. The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes included with the victims of the Stalin era." [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_...

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