71–80 of 217 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither the government nor an ad agency needs to know where I am, no matter how "rough" the data is. It's none of their business.
At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.
>For years, the internet advertising industry has been sucking up our data, including our location data For years, people have been sharing everything they do, what they do, people they spent time with, where they live. Advertisement industry just adds more info to complete your profile, what you buy, what you watch, what you speak online, etc.
People here complain that programmers aren’t engineers because real engineers can accidentally kill people and get sued if they mess an equation up. Instead of just breaking a build or something. I think it’s more concerning that programmers seem to have no care or shame about designing systems that works against the users’ interests. Did you share something intimate in our chat? Well it’s not E2E, moron, we have tha…
Anecdotally, it feels like it fits right in with the "if there's no cop around to give me a ticket, I can drive however I want" attitude I've seen post-Covid. People entering two-way turn lanes or HOV merge lanes to PASS people in the main lane. People going through stop signs without any stopping while I'm waiting for my turn. Using the HOV on-ramp lane with only the driver to merge onto the freeway where it's clearly marked "24 hour HOV lane", etc.
It's as if the entire social compact evaporated during/after Covid, and "everyone only out for themselves" is the norm now.
Or maybe I'm just more aware of it and more cynical.
Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...
- you always denied those popups
- .. including any hidden legitimate interest sections that are being treated as a second, opt-out "consent" for things that really don't actually qualify as legitimate interest
- and the companies actually followed it
Then in theory the companies won't have that data. But doing 1 is tedious, companies exercise dark patterns to avoid you doing 2, and it's hard to audit if they've done 3, so most people are probably in those data sets.
Also, a government likely to buy this data for purposes like in the original article, is unlikely to be the type of government that goes around slapping companies for not complying with privacy regulation on that data.
Does sharing location with family (Android) leak any data?
I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate: The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is g…
Neither the government nor an ad agency needs to know where I am, no matter how "rough" the data is. It's none of their business.
"Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker" - https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading: Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location. That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have f…
That location information is not available to apps or ad networks without user consent. The government can access it from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.
Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...
You can enact all the laws you want, but what do you do when the government in charge just ignores them?
A law that says the government can't ask for this stuff doesn't help very much. They'll ignore it when it suits them.
A law that says it's illegal for private companies to hand it over would be better. When caught between a request from the government and a law that says they're not allowed to honor that request, there's a good chance they'll obey the law rather than the rogue agency.
A law that says it's illegal for private companies to collect this data in the first place would be even better. It could still be worked around, but it's more likely to be uncovered, and they'd only get data after the point where they convinced a company to start collecting it.
Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...
“Would European-style privacy laws protect against this?” is the kind of question that sounds more clarifying than it actually is, because it collapses about five separate problems into one vague gesture at “Europe.” The issue here isn’t simply “lack of privacy law.” It’s: 1. apps collecting precise location data in the first place, 2. adtech infrastructure broadcasting that data through RTB, 3. brokers aggregating a…
Unless you have some body which is a) serious about enforcement, b) sufficiently toothful to make a dent and c) not undermined by wider geopolitical posturing or economic neutering, you can have all of the regulation you might want and still end up in the same place. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try and control this, but that we have some extremely large genies to stuff back into bottles along the way.
I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate: The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is g…
You'd be surprised what can be done when data from different source is fused together.
Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716
Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf