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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

It would appear that sometimes even paying for the service doesn’t mean you won’t end up as the product anyway.

How can one avoid this kind of aggregated location tracking?

As long as you want to receive calls, the cell service provider will know your approximate location. If you have wifi available, you can mitigate this by only using a voip/messaging service like jmp.chat. You'll still be unavailable while on the road, though.

If you have tons of money, satphone is always an option.

Satphones still get your location data, although by default not to quite as precise a location. Some of them do GPS on the handset to give location data separately, and all of them can be localized pretty precisely (either to a circle or a specific location) if the operator wants, although for some networks this isn't routine. The default is just footprint and then slant distance/timing, but most systems (iridium, etc.) are more complicated.

VoIP and then VPN/tunnel/whatever (or just opportunistic wifi use) to connect and pull down messages is the only reasonable way.

There's nothing wrong with a cell phone provider collecting aggregate information on where their subscribers are on their network. Its reasonable for them to do so, as it helps them analyze how to properly prioritize network upgrades (where to build towers, add capacity, etc.) It is not reasonable for them to sell individualized data to anyone and everyone who feels like tossing them a few hundred bucks.

Its reasonable that a hospital would know a good deal about me. They'll know current diagnoses, previous diagnoses, medications, probably some generalized family medical history, extensive identification numbers, etc. Its important for them to be able to have this data for them to do their job of healing me. However, its unreasonable for them to then just sell this data on the open market. That's why we passed HIPAA/HITECH.

> How can one avoid this kind of aggregated location tracking?

Write your representatives, explain the problem, and ask them to fix it.

Do not carry a phone.

When the overarching goal is to return as much money as possible to investors quarter after quarter, this is what you get. Anything and everything is fair game now.

You guys need (something like) GDPR in the US. I believe it's a necessity.

There are lots of things needed in the US.

Meaning, GDRP will be a result of other (political) changes? I'd concur.

Yes. Instead of focusing on corporate profits the US should focus on quality of service (in every aspect of life) for citizens.

Probably, though eliminating cash bail would address this particular problem and is a good idea anyway.

It seems to me that eliminating bondsmen is better. This should coincide with actual affordable cash bail.

Unless you meant eliminating all forms of bail involving money. I actually have no idea how that works here in the Netherlands.

No we don't, it's a terrible law that unnecessarily burdens business and just makes it even harder to run a business. We don't need any more legal hoops to jump through; it's not the users data, it's our data about the user. The notion that data about you belongs to you is frankly absurd, just because the EU hopped on the crazy train doesn't mean the rest of the planet should follow them.

> it's not the users data, it's our data about the user. The notion that data about you belongs to you is frankly absurd

Interestingly, I find your viewpoint to be just as absurd. Why shouldn't data about me belong to me? Why can't I tell people not to collect data about me when they are providing me with an unrelated service?

For the same reason a photo take of you in a public place isn't yours, it belongs to the photographer. The Internet is a public space; you don't own the public space and you don't have any right or authority to tell anyone collecting public data that you own it just because you're in it. It's not your data, it's my data, I collected it. You don't want it collected, don't go spewing it out in public spaces.

You have a point, but the problem is that there's no way to not spew data out in public spaces. I'd have to cut off all of the following:

  - my mobile phone
  - my landline phone
  - all credit cards and bank accounts
  - all hosted email solutions
  - all other hosted ways of communication (social media, messaging apps)
  - all ways of transport unless I own the devices (and even some cars you could own have telemetry these days...)

Basically only talk face to face, ride old cars and use cash or Monero. It's unrealistic.

Hey, that's the price of using all of those things, if you don't want to pay that price; don't. You don't own a photo I take of you nor do you own data I collect about you from the public sphere.

Why would you want to make it a price to pay? We choose what's legal and what's not, it's not given to us in some great revelation. Do you think people's lives would be better without privacy, or with privacy?

I see little benefit in developing an alternative system of payment to the dollar, some form of intellectual nudity, implications of which I don't fully understand. The dollar is fine, charge me and leave me alone.

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