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It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells itself.
Edit: It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells us.
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.
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
Is there not also a requirement for clean consent? Ie a weather app can’t track your precise location?
Even if Google and Apple both want to commit to fighting this, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, because there are all sorts of different ways to track users that the platforms can't control.
As an easy example: every time you share an Instagram post/video/reel, they generate a unique link that is tracked back to you so they can track your social graph by seeing which users end up viewing that link. (TikTok does the same thing, although they at least make it more obvious by showing that in the UI with "____ shared this video with you").
why would someone include tech that makes people think twice about using the app, unless it is required if you want to "sell" in a particular venue.
if your developing geolocation based apps, location tracking is a core function.
a calender, absolutely does not require location tracking beyond what side of the prime meridian are you on.
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.
It's not though.
Critical for myriad elective purposes? Sure.
Alone, these points are not deanonymizing, it's when there's other data associated.
A lot isn't good enough.
That's opt-in, not opt-out.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/opt-out
GDPR tried. And the narrative around GDPR was deliberately completely derailed by adtech.
Lack of enforcement didn't help either
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.
Congrats on gullibly believing the ad tech narrative.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based...
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.
In thise 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.
GDPR has literally nothing to do with cookie popups. That was, and is, adtech
that's what causes the popups.
it should prohibit it outright, consent or not.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#wifi-privacy
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.
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