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

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

#211
post #127
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to invent new jurisprudence - if the location data can be used to identify an individual, it is personal data under the GDPR and enjoys all the rights and protections enabled by the regulation.

The GDPR doesn't apply to most of the world, it's awful legislation anyway. It's not your data, it's my data about you, I own it, it's in my databases, and if you don't want me to have it, you shouldn't have given it to me freely to begin with.

> It's not your data, it's my data about you, I own it, it's in my databases

And there you have the main difference between European and US laws and mindset. Because it is my data, you are only allowed to store it in your database as long as I say you can, and you can only use it for what I have agree on. Since it is my data you cannot give or sell it to anyone else

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

#212

Perhaps this is a good reason to use Google Voice and not give anyone the underlying real phone number with cell service.

I started doing something like this (but with a different provider) and I noticed this is surprisingly difficult:

Especially messaging providers identify users based on phone numbers, but also a lot of websites started requiring a phone number verification. Those virtual phone numbers are often rejected. This can cause situations in which you have different phone numbers on 2 services.

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

#213
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.

How come this doesn't apply to any other sort of debt this is really bad logic.

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

#214
post #184

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…

The Fugitive: Evidence on Public Versus Private Law Enforcement from Bail Jumping https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18862432

Know what's even more effective and cheap than Private Law Enforcement? Torturing suspects until they confess and shooting them on the spot if they are guilty.

My point is, this is not about effectiveness, but about legality. A constitutional democracy needs to stay constitutional and legal in its ways of delivering justice, otherwise it's not a constitutional democracy anymore but an anarchy.

Giving private individuals the right to legally kidnap people, as well as massive privacy violations like stated in the OP's article — without any oversight — at least to me looks like a massive violation of the Fourth Amendment.

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

#215

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.

I don't know if I'd say that. "Tech" is a really big field, and most areas don't have anything to do with eroding privacy. Unfortunately, many areas that would have been "safe" years ago, like games and standalone applications, are moving in the direction of violating privacy by phoning home and sending "telemetry" data, but there's still a lot of areas that are good.

I'm a sysad for a small company. We have an on-prem solution and a social media app.

We don't sell our data. We don't trade it. And we adhere to a fedramp medium (in spirit), even though the social media site wasn't checked for that.

Users have control over their profile, and we admins cant even read it (unless we read raw DB, and we dont). And deletion requests entail in zeroing out all user's data. The next day, zeroed data is then purged completely.

Seriously, companies can do this right. And I work for one that absolutely does this right.

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

#216
post #94
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the actual copyright question: copyright requires 'creativity'.

The creative act here is my movement. If I go to an open space and walked the outline of an airplane I have created something, even if it can only be viewed in the data that the phone has collected, the creative act was mine.

One cannot copyright facts else the first one to blurt out a truth would be the only one allowed to speak it. The fact that the truth contains facts about an artistic endeavor doesn't make the actual data about reality an artistic endeavor as the recording of those facts is in no way creative.

If you filmed yourself walking around like an airplane you would own the clip. Blog about it and you own the article. But the space you occupied at 10:35AM last Thursday is a singular indisputable fact with not an ounce of creativity. In fact more to the point even what they have is actually facts about their own equipment like which tower you were close to at that time which its hard to imagine you owning.

There are laws designed keep people from collecting and misusing your data in countries not run by morons. There is no reasonable way you are going to acquire this same privacy and protection by trying to misuse copyright creatively. I'm sure actual lawyers are likely to regard interesting legal theories the same way engineers regard interesting theories on how to make engines run forever for free via magnets.

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

#217
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.

The demand from these mega companies and their pay keeps your pay high.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bounty hunters are not universal. For example, here in Oregon they are illegal.

There is also no private bail in Oregon afaik, but I think only 5 states or so are like that.

Yep, we set a bond, and you can pay 10% to the court to bail yourself out. If you skip, the sheriff is the one who will come for you. Though in practice most people are released on their own recognizance, no bond is set except for serious cases.

Also, Oregon doesn't just outlaw bounty hunters as part of our own process, we outlaw them altogether. Bounty hunting is classified as kidnapping.

While there are many things Oregon could do better, there are a whole bunch of things, like this, which I think we are absolutely right on.

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