Discussion

It Is Time to Ban the Sale of Precise Geolocation

uxhacker: More details are available here, including screenshots of the tool.https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based...

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

Swizec: Screenshot in that tweet says 13 months FYI

ch4s3: 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.

troupo: > IMO we should ban gathering this data withoutGDPR tried. And the narrative around GDPR was deliberately completely derailed by adtech.Lack of enforcement didn't help either

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

toofy: 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”.

rubyfan: 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.

lifestyleguru: 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.

rubyfan: 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.

troupo: [Cookie] Lifespan: 13 MonthsData Retention: Standard Retention (4320 days)

ch4s3: 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.

ryandrake: There is no such things as "clearly agreed to by all parties" when it comes to end users. Companies provide a one-sided, "take it or leave it" EULA, and if you don't agree to everything in it, you don't use the product. There is no meeting of the minds, there is no negotiation, and there is no actual agreement. It's a rule book dictated by one side.

ch4s3: GDPR like all EU regulation is needlessly complicated and aimed at a compliance model that seems designed for SAP.

troupo: You can literally read the entire "complicated" regulation in one sitting in an afternoon. There's literally nothing complex or complicated about it.Congrats on gullibly believing the ad tech narrative.

ch4s3: 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.

wolvoleo: 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.

troupo: 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

lotu: 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.

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

ryandrake: The "GDPR is complicated" meme has been circulating among software developers since probably before it was even written. It's so wild that HN dunks on it so much: Here we have a societal problem in computing we've been complaining about for decades, someone offers an incremental but imperfect regulation to start taking steps to correct it, and everyone hates it!

pocksuppet: Same with the California age input box.

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

pwg: 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.

rockskon: 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.

linkjuice4all: 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.

stavros: There is the GDPR.

romaniv: 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.

vovanidze: 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

microtonal: 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).

ch4s3: Being able to read something in one sitting doesn't make it simple or obvious. The law establishes a board that gets to set new requirements.

stavros: As someone who has to implement it, it's really not bad at all: Ask the user for consent to use their data, and don't be misleading about it. That's it.The rest of the "It'S So LaRgE AnD UndErSpEciFieD" is just FUD. The regulators don't just slap fines, they work with you to get you to comply, and they just want to see that you're putting in the effort instead of messing them about.I have literally never been surprised by the GDPR. Whenever I thought "surely this is allowed" it was, whenever I thought "this can't be allowed", it wasn't. For everything in the middle, nobody will punish you for an honest mistake.

redwall_hp: Anti GDPR people: "it's so complicated not being able to walk into someone's house and take their things! Which things can I not take? How about this? And now I need a lawyer if I take someone's things? Ridiculous!"Just don't spy on people.

stavros: Yeah that's pretty much what it feels like, or sometimes it's "what if someone's stuff is lying on the street? Can I take it then?" and the regulator is kind of like "look around and ask if it belongs to anyone, and if not, sure".

jandrewrogers: 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.

nickburns: [delayed]

em-bee: prohibits [...] without user consentthat's what causes the popups.it should prohibit it outright, consent or not.

SoftTalker: 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.

microtonal: 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.

mystraline: 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.

jandrewrogers: 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.

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

gruez: >I think we should make this type of tracking opt-out by defaultThat's opt-in, not opt-out.https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opt-out

nickburns: [delayed]

kube-system: Ultimately, a map is anonymous data containing lat/lon of everyone's houseAlone, these points are not deanonymizing, it's when there's other data associated.

jandrewrogers: Only if you consider the entire concept of logistics in civilization as "elective".

nickburns: [delayed]

pocksuppet: Then it's not a valid contract and therefore does not absolve them of criminal liability for stalking you.

kube-system: Contracts of adhesion can be valid contracts. The ability to negotiate or equal bargaining power is not a required element of a contract.Furthermore, you cannot contract away criminal liability if any exists.

lukeschlather: Even attempting to use a contract of adhesion to justify selling GPS location data to a third party should be a criminal act.

rolph: [delayed]