Ban the sale of precise geolocation

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/it-is-time-to-ban-the-sale-of-precise-geolocation

by hn_acker • 3 months ago

768 198 3 months ago

troupo12• 3 months ago

Don't you want random companies to store your precise location for 12 years? https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541

Swizec• 3 months ago

Screenshot in that tweet says 13 months FYI

mzajc• 3 months ago

  > Lifespan: 13 Months
  > ...
  > Standard retention (4320 Days)

It looks like a cookie prompt, so I assume "Lifespan" refers to cookie expiration and "retention" to how long the data (including geolocation) is retained on the spyware company's servers.

troupo12• 3 months ago

[Cookie] Lifespan: 13 Months

Data Retention: Standard Retention (4320 days)

ch4s37• 3 months ago

IMO we should ban gathering this data without a warrant or specific contractual agreement between the device owner and entity aggregating the data. As much as congress loves to claim the interstate commerce theory of everything, this seems like a slam dunk.

Dwedit• 3 months ago

Contractual agreement? Nobody reads things like EULAs or terms of service. It's probably in there already.

rubyfan3• 3 months ago

Right, privacy terms are written to be vague and permissive. Even if you read them you can’t usually understand how the data will be used or opt out.

toofy• 3 months ago

if it were up to me i’d require a hand signed contract that explicitly, up front and in plain english gives permission and is not transferable to any “partners”.

ch4s37• 3 months ago

I should have been a bit more clear. We should ban retention for any purposes where it is not explicitly required for the intended function and clearly agreed to by all parties. Think somethig like strava or asset tracking. You know it stores gps data, and why.

teeray• 3 months ago

Instead of “I accept”, you’re given a quiz

rubyfan3• 3 months ago

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.

gruez2• 3 months ago

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

troupo12• 3 months ago

IMO we should ban gathering this data without

GDPR tried. And the narrative around GDPR was deliberately completely derailed by adtech.

Lack of enforcement didn't help either

ch4s37• 3 months ago

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

wakawaka282• 3 months ago

Every EULA already covers this basically. The real problems are: people agree to it, and the government can do an end-run around the constitution by simply purchasing data or hiring contractors.

philipnee• 3 months ago

companies don't buy anymore, they just take it. think about Claude, every time you use it, you are literally give away your code, your data, and even your personal information.

uxhacker2• 3 months ago

More details are available here, including screenshots of the tool.

https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based...

mtlynch• 3 months ago

Corresponding HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758309

wolvoleo4• 3 months ago

Just ban the sale of any kind of adtracking. That way we can get rid of the cookiewalls too.

Missed opportunity by the EU when they wrote GDPR.

troupo12• 3 months ago

GDPR literally prohibits the sale of user data and tracking without user consent (because yes, you want to give people the possibility to opt in for a variety of reasons).

GDPR has literally nothing to do with cookie popups. That was, and is, adtech

pocksuppet6• 3 months ago

I think they are saying GDPR did not ban websites from noisily asking for consent and trying to trick you into giving consent.

lotu• 3 months ago

My job was building cookie walls in response to GDPR. It might not have been the “intent” but it certainly was the consequence of that law.

em-bee2• 3 months ago

prohibits [...] without user consent

that's what causes the popups.

it should prohibit it outright, consent or not.

GJim5• 3 months ago

Missed opportunity by the EU when they wrote GDPR.

Not really.

There are legitimate reasons why I might wish to be tracked or give my personal data to a company. As long as I'm asked to give clear, opt-in informed consent, this is perfectly fine. This is the very essence of the GDPR!

Instead, direct your ire to the scummy adtech industry who are constantly asking to invade my privacy and smell my knickers trying to work out what I ate for lunch. Another law to ban the adtech industry would be welcome from me, though would meet fierce resistance from the likes of Google.

The GDPR is well written.

wolvoleo4• 3 months ago

There are legitimate reasons why I might wish to be tracked or give my personal data to a company. As long as I'm asked to give clear, opt-in informed consent, this is perfectly fine. This is the very essence of the GDPR!

In these cases they don't even need to ask for your permission.

Instead, direct your ire to the scummy adtech industry who are constantly asking to invade my privacy and smell my knickers trying to work out what I ate for lunch. Another law to ban the adtech industry would be welcome from me, though would meet fierce resistance from the likes of Google.

No, the EU should have done more to prevent this. They didn't want to kill a billions-of-euros industry. But they should have.

Johnbot• 3 months ago

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 checking where the device returns to at night you can figure its home address. Then if you find information on the residents (work locations, schools, etc.), you see if said device goes where each resident of the home address is likely to go, and you now have a pretty good idea of exactly who the device belongs to.

1121redblackgo• 3 months ago

Yep. With side channel/one order of thinking above the laws, its trivial to get around said laws. Need better laws.

sroussey• 3 months ago

Companies exist that de-anonymize other data brokers data. Lets the other data brokers claim they have anonymized data while end end users get everything.

ImPostingOnHN• 3 months ago

you could probably run a anonymization company at the same time you run a de-anonymization company

rockskon3• 3 months ago

There is no such thing as anonymized location data when you have the location of something where and when they sleep and work.

It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells itself.

Forgeties79• 3 months ago

And with LLM’s now it’s easier than ever to piece the parts together. Companies were doing it before we even knew what LLM’s were capable of.

Edit: It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells us.

Terr_2• 3 months ago

Right, there's probably no other phone in the world that typically stops for hours within 1000 feet of my bed and typically stops on Monday-Friday within 1000 feet of my work-desk.

abustamam3• 3 months ago

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.

vovanidze• 3 months ago

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 there is literally nothing to de-anonymize. stateless infra is the only sane way forward

microtonal2• 3 months ago

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).

uxhacker2• 3 months ago

How is this legal under the GPDR? There is clear examples in the citizenlab document of a user been tracked inside of the EU from outside.

Is there not also a requirement for clean consent? Ie a weather app can’t track your precise location?

malfist• 3 months ago

A lot of geolocation data on the market is anonymized

A lot isn't good enough.

jandrewrogers8• 3 months ago

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.

nickburns6• 3 months ago

and location is critical for myriad purposes.

It's not though.

Critical for myriad elective purposes? Sure.

ninalanyon2• 3 months ago

In what sense can the latitude and longitude of my house be called anonymous data?

kube-system5• 3 months ago

Ultimately, a map is anonymous data containing lat/lon of everyone's house

Alone, these points are not deanonymizing, it's when there's other data associated.

teraflop• 3 months ago

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.

totetsu• 3 months ago

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?

ramoz• 3 months ago

From what I've seen none of this is that complex, one could simply 'draw a circle around your house' and get all the "anonymized" device pings and just trace those.

nzach• 3 months ago

enough samples that you can apply statistics to find precise locations, in many cases you can de-anonymize the IDs

I think a lot of people don't realize the power of a big enough sample size. With enough samples even something pretty innocent looking like your daily step counter could make you identifiable.

As far as I know we don't have large enough databases to make this happen in practice, but I don't think this is impossible in the future.

jandrewrogers8• 3 months ago

How large are you estimating is "large enough"?

lifestyleguru• 3 months ago

Smartphones, 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.

mystraline• 3 months ago

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.

9991• 3 months ago

GrapheneOS is a proper Linux. The hardware isn't open, but otherwise it's quite nice and clearly designed for the end-user's benefit, in stark contrast to the more widely-adopted alternative mobile OSes.

reorder9695• 3 months ago

If anyone's interested in this the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is rather revealing of the sheer scale of this.

Cider99863• 3 months ago

WiFi isn't that bad, we have mac address randomization[1] and VPNs. Cellular is obscenely bad, though.

[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#wifi-privacy

Eextra953• 3 months ago

Does anyone know of any groups that are organizing and lobbying to get things like this into law? I know about the EFF but they seem to be more focused on documenting and reporting instead of lobbying and getting things passed.

dminor• 3 months ago

Senator Wyden has been pretty focused on it. I think it's going to take some changes in Congress before it happens though.

Cider99863• 3 months ago

Massie and McGovern in the house as well.

Cider99863• 3 months ago

Restore the fourth, Brennan Center, EPIC, Freedom of the press foundation.

glitchc• 3 months ago

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

Mithriil• 3 months ago

I would expect such a law to be lobbied to death.

davebren2• 3 months ago

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.

foresto• 3 months ago

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

warkdarrior• 3 months ago

So you want to ban all mapping apps and all fitness apps?

ssl-3• 3 months ago

Nothing external needs my precise location to navigate with a map. An approximate location is sufficient to deliver to my device a map of an area I'm in, and of the overall route, and all of the details that are useful for navigation.

Fitness apps can be local. We have pocket supercomputers; certainly, we don't need help from the clown to keep track of how far (or how energetically) we biked or walked today, or where that took place.

romaniv• 3 months ago

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 someone that a new surveillance machine has been constructed and launched.

So the current feedback process involves: construction → exploitation → reporting → public awareness → legislation. This is too slow. Moreover, operating in this environment is exhausting.

We need a different feedback loop altogether. I'm not sure which one would work best, but something different needs to be considered.

jjk166• 3 months ago

Yeah, abuse of privacy should be the crime, the same way theft is. How exactly the crime is committed shouldn't matter. Companies can have every right to make a compelling argument that what they did was not an abuse of privacy when they are defending themselves in court.

And critically, it is not someone becoming aware of private information that is the abuse of privacy, it is exploiting that private information which is the abuse. There may be countless legitimate technical reasons you need to collect data, but there can not possibly be a technical justification for selling it.

heavyset_go• 3 months ago

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.

linkjuice4all• 3 months ago

Let’s just stretch copyright to cover movement/location as a protected creative expression. It’s somewhat ridiculous but we’ve already established case law and technology for handling/mishandling protected assets.

gruez2• 3 months ago

Then they add a clause to the ToS with "you grant us and our affiliates a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to your location..."

hn_acker• 3 months ago

Cory Doctorow argued against using copyright law as a substitute for privacy law or labor law [1], and I argue the same for location privacy. Copyright law already gets abused enough in contexts that indisputably involve copying of creative work. I do not want to stretch copyright law into location/movement privacy, where nonconsensual recording of location/movement does not necessarily copy something created by the person whose location was tracked. At least in the US, copyright comes into existence when creative expression is recorded in a tangible medium (such as your device's RAM, because outside of my beloved meme world you cannot download more RAM), and the copyright belongs to whoever did the recording. If an app on your phone records your location, was it you who recorded it? Was it the phone maker who recorded it? Was it the app maker who recorded it? Keep in mind, maybe you didn't install the app, or maybe you weren't aware that the app would track your location when you first installed it.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-si...

titzer• 3 months ago

These people really have no idea at the level of data collection from Google's rootkit on Android known as "Google Play Services".

lifeisstillgood• 3 months ago

There needs to be a believeable legal framework behind this.

Imagine a option on your iPhone that says “Enable this to allow geo-location tracking for organisations registered under the NOADSJUSTPUBLICGOOD Act” - then any wifi endpoint could locate you as long based on signal strength etc and that data could only be made available to people registered under the act.

Would we see new understanding of how people move around in cities, would we see better traffic information, Inthink so - as long as people believe that there are real teeth to the laws and they enforced loudly and publically.

We should embrace the benefits of a society wide epidemiology experiment - the benefits for public health are incredible. (Add to that supply chain logistics on open ledgers and many of the new things that just were not possible before and the future of open transparent but well regulated democracies is bright.

Let me know if you spot one.

kristianpaul• 3 months ago

Haven't read the article yet but having more NTRIP public endpoint could help a lot to this precise location

shevy-java• 3 months ago

Soon Geolocation will be tied to Age! Then you can meet locals and congratulate them on their birthday. The movie Minority Report was way too timid in its prediction here. Age up everything! \o/

erelong• 3 months ago

Alternatively, opt out of services that sell it

reenorap• 3 months ago

I'm of the opinion now that posting videos online without the explicit permission of EVERYONE in the video should be illegal. It's one thing to take a video and keep it on your phone but if you share it outside of your family and only your family, then it needs to have the expressed consent of everyone whose face is on it otherwise it should be a crime.

The previous views on privacy didn't take into account the fact that everyone now has video cameras and people are incentivized to violate privacy to make money as influencers. I think people's privacies need to be protected and I think that means making laws around it much, much stricter. This includes things like location data, it shouldn't be sold or exposed at all.

wakawaka282• 3 months ago

So, no videos of festivals or politicians speaking? How about legally recorded conversations or anything else exposing corruption? Body cam footage? Harassment is already a crime. Take care not to come up with oppressive laws to deal with a nuisance.

kidnoodle• 3 months ago

I had a theory that the way to solve this was a location intelligence data union which sold safely anonymised aggregates and shared the profits, while also litigating on behalf of members under available legislation to stop other people using their data.

Alas, I was stymied by not having any cash to work on it, and the unit economics were not very VC friendly (at least I assume that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t get any traction from VCs).

groos• 3 months ago

Most people don't realize how bad geolocated data is for a free society. I can buy data from a broker, geo-fence your house address, and then I'm able to see all the places where you went, who you associate with, and identify all you associate with by tracking them to addresses. All of this happens with anonymized device identifiers. It is the wet dream of a company such as Palantir and all governments who desire absolute control over their populations.

pnw• 3 months ago

The examples show Android devices. How does Webloc track iOS devices given Apple doesn't allow unique IDs and allows the user to disable the ad ID? I wish these articles would go into a bit more detail for the technical reader.

treebeard901• 3 months ago

Once wealthy and powerful people realize how this can be used to track them they will start cracking down. One of many examples for how underrated access to location data is for unauthorized people, it is a primary way that the military locates and kills targets in foreign countries. It is surprising all of the data is so freely available with data brokers. Or in some cases from the app companies themselves, if you're willing to make it worth the trouble for them.

crummy• 3 months ago

Seems there’s an opening for an ElonJet-like tracker that operates on this data.

Schiendelman• 3 months ago

They realize it. But they can exercise enough power to target removal of information that they don't want public.

charcircuit• 3 months ago

I think it's fair for law enforcement to compensate the people collecting this data instead of forcing them to give it away for free.

ButlerianJihad2• 3 months ago

When I had the opportunity to peer into public records, I found some extremely intriguing stuff.

There was one person with a feminine name who showed up with a “home address” that would correspond to being my “neighbor” at home, at my clinic, at church, when I went to college, etc. All the years corresponded correctly, and the addresses were some residential place about a block or less away from the places where I went.

For all I know, this person was either fictional or an innocent bystander. She did appear to have a Facebook account or two. I was never able to directly contact her. But I found it very strange and I wondered what would be gained by doxxxing me in this manner?

Of course this has nothing directly to do with GPS coordinates, but imagine if the GPS began to be part of your public record as well, or on your credit report. Imagine if it was entered into the public record what coffee house you visited every morning, or if there were errors in this record.

GJim5• 3 months ago

GPS coordinates

* coordinates

There are many ways of establishing ones latitude and longitude without recourse to one particular GNSS system.

ButlerianJihad2• 3 months ago

Excuse my colloquialism. All I meant was “universally recognized coördinate format”, okay?

Terr_2• 3 months ago

"Get consent first" hasn't worked because the average consumer can't give informed consent to the kind of stuff going on behind the scenes.

What about: "If something bad happens because of the data your company shared or lost, it is criminally and financially liable?"

atmosx• 3 months ago

Both make sense. Depends on who you want to protect.

eptcyka• 3 months ago

I want geolocation to not be sold. Yet, I do not believe we have been successful in banning the sale of cocaine and elephant tusks. What makes us think this will be an easier problem to solve?

lionkor• 3 months ago

People get arrested for running large cocaine operations, that's the difference.

stult• 3 months ago

What a facile point. By your logic, literally nothing should be banned. Murder, rape, etc.

KaiserPro• 3 months ago

The problem the USA has is that it has no concept of "private data" outside of some part of HIPAA.

Until that changes you're going to be stuck.

Something as simple as the data protections act 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998) would kneecap a lot of the shady shit that goes on in the USA.

victor22• 3 months ago

You cannot regulate anything anymore, everything is geotracked, be real

sciencesama• 3 months ago

instead buy it and show the horror things ! may be focus on politicians who can be swayed with this data !

duxup• 3 months ago

It's frustrating how much of the system already is a hassle for everyone who already does the things right.

I make some apps that use precise location. We don't sell the data, we share it with the interested party who the app user is working for only. The user is fully aware when the data is collected and when not, they can even turn it off at will. Nobody even cares who has the device, just that they're delivering a package or something to that effect. It's all good.

Then I hit the app-stores and it's like pulling teeth with paperwork and rejections (depends on the reviewer, sometimes you fly through, sometimes very much not).

I have to attest that we don't do shit with an email that may or may not appear in a field, that we don't do porn (I have no idea where that reviewer got that idea). Some reviewer misread something and now I have to explain that no we don't use contacts, we never do... wtf. More delays.

I'm privacy minded so I don't so much mind the IDEA that I have to attest to all these things, but all the hoops I have to run through is because the bad guys who steal all this info and sell it do their thing, but they're still doing their bad thing just fine ...

Meanwhile my app is stuck in review.

It feels like being pulled over randomly by the cops because "well there's a lot of speeders out there" when I'm not one of them. It's all hassle for everyone doing it right, and for the bad guys or the apps that clearly don't have to follow the rules that everyone else does it has no impact on them.

The whole system is borked.

nullc• 3 months ago

Perhaps you saw the news about GM reaching an FTC settlement because they were tracking the locations cars they made at all times and selling the information to LexisNexis. You might have left the articles with a belief that GM agreed to stop.

Their settlement allows them to sell precise locations -- but with 'anonymous ids' instead of names, and also allows them to sell data with name/personal information but only zipcode resolution location information.

Ban the sale of precise geolocation

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