
New York City to Consider Banning Sale of Cellphone Location Data - johnny313
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/nyregion/cellphone-tracking-location-data.html
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sfkdjf9j3j
It's wild how common this is, especially on Android, and how little people
know about it. Those free apps you enjoy? Many of them make money by shipping
with a 3rd party SDK that records your location (among other identifying
information), collates it with other identifying information, and feeds it
into the massive real time ad-tech system that powers large swaths of the
internet.

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eugeniub
Too bad your location is still sold by your cellular provider even if you
delete all those apps.

~~~
gourou
> AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have pledged to stop selling location data to
> brokers who may sell the information on the black market.

Most of them stopped according to the article.

~~~
kerkeslager
Pledging to stop and stopping are two very different things.

Pledging to stop is pretty standard operating procedure whenever bad privacy
practices cause a PR stink, but it's quite common to see the same company with
the same PR stink a year or two later. Pledges to stop often have more to do
with the media cycle than any actual intention to stop.

~~~
smolder
Yeah, a good example of this is Pepsi pledging to remove Brominated Vegetable
Oil from their drinks in response to a campaign by a young student that caught
media attention. Years later, they never did any such thing.

~~~
hanniabu
Which really makes no sense when you think about it because it's already
illegal in Europe and Japan so might as well just remove it altogether.

~~~
wysifnwyg
It all depends on the monetary difference doing so makes. If it's
significantly cheaper, then they will continue to include it for legal
markets.

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tsumnia
Just let me profit or opt-out of the sale! Some how the mindset/unspoken
agreement/TOS-spoken agreement that I have to "pay" with my personal data to
use these products has become too commonplace. It doesn't have to be much, but
if I were allowed to generate an extra $20 a month that'd be great! I already
use Google Rewards, and at this point that's the only "surveys" I get.

If I play fantasy futurologist for a second, it would even make for some
interesting economics. Underrepresented groups for a particular analysis could
pay more, because those groups' data is rarer. A straight, white, male techie
is probably a saturated market, so I wouldn't generate much, but a Hispanic
woman's could be more valuable.

~~~
citilife
These companies use your data to make money. Paying you would mean they'd have
to make more than they pay you from the addition of said data.

Today, I suspect the benefit of having said data is probably unknown. This
data is probably only valuable in aggregate to determine trends.

Showing you a random advertisement vs an advertisement based on the page info
vs an advertisement with your data included. I suspect an advertisement based
on the page info is 90+% of the value.

That being said, they can't truly pay you meaningful amounts for your data and
answer to their shareholders. That's why it's not really done yet.

Plus, they dont' need to in many cases. The whole internet is designed to
collect all this data from you, without your consent being necessary.

~~~
koolba
> Today, I suspect the benefit of having said data is probably unknown. This
> data is probably only valuable in aggregate to determine trends.

One of the biggest purchasers of this data is private bounty hunters. It’s
definitely useful to them, both in real time and “recent time”.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-
hu...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunters-att-
tmobile-sprint-customer-location-data-years)

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gourou
> giving the right to sue to customers who have had their location data shared
> without their explicit permission.

Are Terms of Service considered explicit?

~~~
save_ferris
Hopefully not, nobody reads the TOS and it's really unreasonable to expect
users to. For example, Twitter's TOS clocks in at around 5,000 words, who has
time for that?

Between the apps for work and the apps I use for fun, it would take me weeks
to fully read through all of the TOS for every piece of software I use if I
was insane enough to do it.

~~~
rubinelli
"Nobody reads those" isn't a valid defense. That said, I see a huge problem in
adding abusive clauses when you have a monopoly or duopoly in the area. The
customer can refuse, but then what? Will they simply not have a phone or
Internet?

~~~
jonlucc
> "Nobody reads those" isn't a valid defense.

Why not? Presumably the goal is that consumers understand the agreements
they're in. If nobody reads ToS and everyone knows that nobody reads ToS, then
they aren't useful communication.

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viburnum
Just ban all ad tech while you’re at it. No one will miss it.

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edf13
You will when you see the knock on effect to all consumer good pricing

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aqme28
Why would there be any significant added cost to consumer good pricing?

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JumpCrisscross
> _Why would there be any significant added cost to consumer good pricing?_

Assuming ad tech makes advertising more effective, banning it would make
challenging a market incumbent more difficult. You'd need to burn more cash to
teach more consumers about your product, a larger fraction of whom would be
outside your target market.

Granted, ad tech does not always add value. And there is a legitimate question
as to the trade-off between privacy and consumer prices. But the tradeoff
exists. Reducing the threat of new entrants means incumbents will raise
prices.

~~~
sitkack
That assumes there is only one way to reach users, ie through internet wide
surveillance. This is simply not true. You have a new wakeboard gadget,
advertise it on a wakeboard forum or a wakeboard site. I _visit_ EETimes so I
can see the ads.

An intermediary doesn't need to _know_ me so they can profit from selling my
existence and desires to a 3rd party at the drop of a hat.

~~~
vonmoltke
> That assumes there is only one way to reach users, ie through internet wide
> surveillance. This is simply not true. You have a new wakeboard gadget,
> advertise it on a wakeboard forum or a wakeboard site. I visit EETimes so I
> can see the ads.

 _This_ assumes "ad tech" == "internet wide surveillance". That is certainly
the most profitable subset, but it is still just a subset. _Something_ needs
to serve those ads and make sure they are relevant to the content they are
shown with, even if it exclusively uses the context of the specific page being
loaded. Something needs to manage campaign tracking to know which specific
sites or which specific ad copy is driving users in, even if no information
about the users themselves is captured. Something needs to manage the
connections between the ad copy and the site being advertised, both to ensure
users go to the place they are supposed to and to combat malicious or hijacked
ads.

All of this is "ad tech". Even if you think we should return exclusively to
the days of random, untracked banner ads _some_ amount of ad tech is
necessary.

~~~
sitkack
I agree, and I don’t think it is necessarily bad. But biz and marketing folks
tasted milk and honey of the panopticon and they will fight kicking and
screaming to keep it.

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dang
Stories about bills that haven't passed yet are mostly fluff, because most
bills never go anywhere. This is a story about a bill that hasn't even been
introduced yet. That makes it an announcement of an announcement, the gold
standard of offtopicness.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20an...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

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thwythwy
How they get free pub for "considering" something. Consideration is for
voters. Act or do not act. There is no consideration.

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kingkawn
This is a meaningful tactic. Voters and cell providers alike are alerted this
is coming down the pipeline. It is a way to gauge voter interest, ie how hard
should the politician push for this particular regulation given the returns on
support that can be anticipated from public engagement. It also puts the cell
providers on notice and incentivizes them to compromise and cooperate to avoid
more hostile regulation.

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thatcat
Seems like in practice this would incentivize providers to lobby the
politician considering legislation..

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tombert
Stuff like this makes me glad to live in NYC, but it does kind of depress me
that it has to come to an explicit _law_ , and moreover even more annoyed that
it was ever legal to do that in the first place.

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frutiger
You’re surprised it needs a law but wasn’t illegal already? How could it be
illegal without a law?

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tombert
I said "explicit" law, since I would have hoped it was covered under previous
law. Clearly I didn't word this correctly, so I apologize for any confusion.

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rezeroed
When I leave home I turn off all networking. I'll turn it on if I need it, but
then turn it off again until I get to work. Same when heading home in the
evening.

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UnFleshedOne
You will have to be in airplane mode (no cell reception) for this to be
meaningful. Even then you probably turned it on enough times in the places you
frequent for the data to be solid.

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rezeroed
I do use airplane mode.

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lostgame
Oh, they'd _consider_ not violating our fundamental privacy?
How...'considerate'.

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sydney6
Seeing is believing.

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dsfyu404ed
Cities don't tend to propose shooting their golden goose in the foot so I hope
this is a decently strong signal that the finance industry doesn't make all
that much use of this data.

Edit: Why is this down-voted so heavily? Too cynical?

