A Proposed Massachusetts Law Would Ban the Sale of Cell Phone Location Data
Data brokers can sell your location data to any paying customer but a Massachusetts bill designed to protect abortion-seekers would outlaw such sales.
It's insane that this is a 'proposed new law' in 2023. That shit should have been illegal the moment it was possible.
The act of collecting the location data should be illegal. Selling it should never have been possible.
Arguably the location data has several purposes, and needs to be collected but shouldn't have been available for sale. It's bad enough you can't keep law enforcement out of it but even worse when random businesses get the information.
That said, in this day and age, it should be a no brainier that your phone is a tracking device for multiple organizations and we should all keep that in mind
Right? The implication here is pretty fuckin' terrible
yuuuuuup
Carl Sagan was right.
“when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues”
He lived through a time when the national guard was murdering college students.
Since then they have only gotten more sinister.
We're in a time where cops are caught on camera killing people. Privacy is a matter of life or death now.
I wonder if they would still be able to sell location data in aggregate?
I play Pokémon Go (yes that's still a thing) and Niantic recently made a deal that they don't sell individual location data which people have taken as they sell bulk location data instead (scrubbing data such as your name etc).
Unless this is enacted in every state, law enforcement can deduce the state a person of interest is in just by not getting location data for them.
But state level location is not that worrisome. I mean, you can take a partial guess from the area code (though that's not that accurate because cell numbers usually stay the same when people move these days).
Plus, would they even know that? There's the question of how you could make sure not to track only people from states with this law without tracking them in the first place. The easy solution is to not track locations with cellular data at all, lest you accidentally run afoul of this law. Plus there probably will be more states passing such laws. You said every state would have to pass it to use process of elimination, but surely it only needs 2?
Actually, if most states passed it the police could not use the process of elimination. Especially if the mix included both Women's rights states and Woman pressing states.
From the article: "Firms say this data is anonymized but the truth is that it can easily be de-anonymized. The data brokerage industry is pretty much totally unregulated, allowing for an assortment of unsavory customers to buy Americans’ data willy nilly."
Isn't this the real issue and not the headline? US really needs GDPR.
Though we definitely do have some issues, being a MA resident is, on balance, pretty nice.
But you can give it away for free! Maybe as a bonus for subscribing to a data broker's service!
meanwhile guns...
