These people really have no idea at the level of data collection from Google's rootkit on Android known as "Google Play Services".
Ban the sale of precise geolocation
61–70 of 205 posts
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't just bury literally anything in an EULA. There's a fair amount of case law establishing that EULAs clauses that are surprising or illegal aren't enforceable.
That fact does not change the point of the individual to which you replied. Regardless of whether the clauses in the EULA are 100% legal, some mixture or 100% illegal, the entire EULA is a "one sided rule-book dictated completely by one side". You, the person held to the EULA's rules, do not get to negotiate on the individual points. You simply have a "take it or go away" set of options.
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
prohibits [...] without user consent that's what causes the popups. it should prohibit it outright, consent or not.
But the only reason the popups are needed is the adtech tracking cookies. You don't need a popup for cookies that are related to essential site functionality.
yes, so if ad tracking is forbidden outright then asking for permission to do it is invalid too.
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we should make this type of tracking opt-out by default. We should also ban the sale of its use to third parties and its use for purposes other than the specific functionality which required it to be enabled in the first place.
>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.
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#65A 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…
In what sense can the latitude and longitude of my house be called anonymous data?
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#66Earlier 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.
Designing around GDPR compliance shows up all over the place in industrial data collection. It doesn't only affect surveillance webslop.
The costs are often worse on industrial side because the data is so much larger and faster than web or mobile data.
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#67Smartphones, mobile apps, mobile networks, and WiFi stopped being your friends around 2015-2016. Now it's just a matter of how much data can be harvested from device sensors in real time until reaching a pain point which doesn't exist.
Yep.
And the FLOSS/Linux phone hardware attempts have frankly sucked.
I was hoping that my PinePhone Pro would actually be usable. But no, its a PineDoorstop.
Proper Linux would be a great 3rd choice. But yeah. We've got a duopoly and not much we can do about it.
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
exactly. calling it 'anonymized' is pure security theater once you have enough data points to map out someones daily routine. waiting for legislation or eulas to fix this is a lost cause since adtech always finds a loophole. the fix has to be architectural. moving toward stateless proxies that strip device identifiers at the edge before they even hit upstream servers. if the payload never touches a persistent db ther…
To be honest, I feel like this is where iOS and Android are failing us. Why is every app allowed to embed a bunch of trackers? Only blocking cross-app tracking on user request as iOS does is not enough (and data of different apps/websites can be correlated externally).
Because we don’t enforce antitrust law in this country and the people that make those decisions profit from the ads.
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Location and identity are inextricably linked. You can't destroy identity without also destroying location and location is critical for myriad purposes. The analytic reconstruction of identity from location is far more sophisticated than the scenarios people imagine. You don't need to know where they live to figure out who they are. Every human leaves a fingerprint in space-time.
> and location is critical for myriad purposes. It's not though. Critical for myriad elective purposes? Sure.
Only if you consider the entire concept of logistics in civilization as "elective".
Re: Ban the sale of precise geolocation
#70A 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.