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Comment by spinach | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that even companies that have a clear paid service do this too. Companies like Google, Facebook and all sorts of free apps, rely on their shady back-end manipulation/ads because their service is free, but that even companies who actually have a product are doing these sorts of shady things as well makes one wonder if there is a future where the web isn't so antagonistic to the users.

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We need something like the GDPR in the United States. Otherwise there’s always going to be someone sleazy offering money which most managers won’t turn down — the check makes their numbers better right now and it’ll be a long time if ever before someone notices.

As much as I would love to have the protections offered by GDPR, I doubt it would even make it past a committee vote. Telecom/technology lobbyists would exert maximum pressure on legislators in order the proposal to die. There's far too much money to be made in trafficking user data.

I don’t disagree that it’ll be hard but I think there’s more awareness of the problem and rejection of “regulation is bad” propaganda than I can remember seeing before. I won’t be surprised if something happens at the state level, especially outside California.

California recently passed legislation that will kick in Jan 1, 2020: https://www.caprivacy.org/

The CCPA explicitly prohibits the re-sale of personal data, so it will at least impact the demand from data resellers of the location data in question, for example -- in theory, anyway.

It also gives consumers the right to request their personal data be deleted. It's, however, unclear how this would impact location data telcos are selling.

As other states begin to consider their own legislation, many are pushing for federal legislation that supersedes state laws, for obvious reasons. That will be worth keeping an eye on.

Everyone is doing this. Not selling all your users' data is just leaving money on the table. The only holdouts are companies who've built their reputations on privacy. And probably not even all of them.

Anyone that doesn’t have advertising as their lifeblood has no incentive to sell user data. That’s far from “everyone”, it’s probably a minority of revenue $ across the entire industry...

Every time things like this happen, the bar for what is acceptable gets lowered. It's only going to get worse.

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