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Comment by LurkersWillLurk | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of parallels between cell phone location privacy and genetic tracking. The average person does not understand that they are creating a record of everywhere they go when they have their cell phone on. The same is true with your DNA - while it's true that you do in fact leave a literal trace of your genes, you don't expect that you could be identified later on simply by the fact that you had lunch.

What we really need is a legislative solution, but unfortunately I have low expectations for Congress, seeing that Carpenter v. United States even had to happen.

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I like your analogy, I'd add that DNA search/collection is akin to scanning cell phone records to see who was in the area at the time of the crime. Which typically requires a warrant.

What would you legislate?

Your location is not private information and never has been. Not sure how you could even legislate to make your DNA protected private information- under HIPPA for instance, considering you leave it everywhere you go. Your fingerprint is not private, your face is not private, and your DNA is not private. I'm not sure how they could be.

Your location isn’t private if you’re observed in a location where you have no expectation of privacy, i.e. outside. But if I’m at a friends house, I absolutely have an expectation that my presence in their home is private to the world at large.

The problem is that dragnet surveillance does not:

1. Handle the subtleties of how we expect privacy to work.

2. Require direct observation of someone in a context where there is no expectation of privacy.

It just works all the time, and contains the ability to unmask private events in the past.

your expectation of privacy is sort of inconsistent here. if you don't have an expectation of privacy when your out in the world, and it's fair game for people to observe you traveling to your friend's house, how can you expect that your presence is private?

> it's fair game for people to observe you traveling to your friend's house

This is true, but if you follow someone consistently enough then it is considered a crime--stalking.

Exemptions for special cases (PIs, bail bondsmen) were put in place with the expectation that those groups would not abuse the system, being "professionals." And of course the police have been allowed to track people under investigation. But private individuals and businesses do not have the right to stalk people.

It's time to put to rest this notion that occasional incidental observation of other people has anything in common with the persistent surveillance enabled by modern tech. One is expected and is fairly low risk, the other is ripe for abuse.

My problem is the scale of the issue, at least when it comes to phones. If I am at my friens the people involved are apt to forget almost everything in a few days. The cellphone tracking system, in theory, will studiously remember exactly where you are till the end of time by a company wit history of give or selling said data to the government in secret.

Well, they have to give your location information to the government. I think it's a bit naive to expect a company to keep your data secret from the Feds. They're just as subject to the law as we are.

If we use electronic devices at all, we're just best advised to operate as if the government has access to anything we say, write, or record on them. That includes our locations. If you're going to see your weed man, or your mistress, you probably want to leave it at home. And no, don't bother buying a "burner" because they can track that too.

All that said, companies should try to keep your location information secret from anyone other than the government. One of the issues right now is that they don't. They make good money using location to target ads for instance.

> Well, they have to give your location information to the government.

It's not like this requirement was an inevitable outcome of governments. We can change laws.

This is why I included the bit about direct observation. Before dragnet surveillance, you would need to travel near someone who had an active interest in you specifically in order for your location to be marked down. With a dragnet surveillance system every movement you make can be used to unmask your whereabouts after the fact, regardless of whether anyone observed it at the time.

I think we agree then. the classic distinction between public and private space is almost a red herring in this argument. the focus should be on how long are you allowed to store information, or maybe even how widely and indiscriminately are you allowed to collect it in the first place.

My presence in private is a protected right in the United States. Being able to track which office I go into in a complex, tracking which room in a house I am in, etc. These types of things require a warrant based on reasonable suspicion and this has been ruled on numerous times. If you're moving from place to place in public view, sure, that's allowed. The police can also follow you and watch you enter a building, but what is the functional difference between preventing access to my house to watch me move from room to room and using cell phone data to track me. My carrier is someone I contract with. I pay them. They should be working in my favor to the fullest extent of the law. While I sympathize with overburdened police forces and tough crimes there's a reason we have these protections in place, to prevent a police state where the police are more beholden to the state than the public it is expected to be serving.

I can't speak to whether that is inconsistent or not, but in support of HN User'village-idiot', I think it'd be a pretty big bummer for people to find out that any tryst they have with a lover is not private, but public in nature.

Taking your phone or your DNA to any such tryst makes it so apparently.

What's worse, there will likely be a lot of scope creep. It's showing up in criminal court. It's showing up in civil court cases. It's definitely going to be showing up in family court. Etc etc etc.

> I can't speak to whether that is inconsistent or not, but in support of HN User'village-idiot', I think it'd be a pretty big bummer for people to find out that any tryst they have with a lover is not private, but public in nature.

it's a bummer for sure, but it's been this way for a while. it's perfectly legal for your wife to hire a PI to follow you around. the police also don't need a warrant to observe your movements.

the part that's new is that all this surveillance can be done passively without any particular reason to suspect you.

imo, the distinction between public and private spaces is pretty reasonable for targeted investigations and observation by fellow citizens. in my view, the real problem is how long information should be stored, especially when collected passively.

I think in general, people who are aware of DNA used as evidence don't understand that it isn't perfect, that most matches are (somewhat) loose statistical matches.

Lots of people probably aren't aware of it though.

The average person knows that cell phone location tracking can be used as evidence in criminal investigations. It shows up all the time in TV and movies.

I agree with you but there's still this weird disconnect where people believe they can be tracked realtime by their phone, but not historically. They know their phone can be 'triangulated' when the cops are actively looking at them, but everyone I show their phone's location history to freaks out about it.

I think this is going to be beyond one country legislators in the vein of GDPR (becoming de facto across the "Western" region).

I am hoping for something think a presumption of data ownership for anything the individual "creates" like digital footprints

Imagine if some spy on espionage mission has sex with you and police/intelligence finds your dna in her bedroom or inside her, and now you'll be under investigation and maybe torchered too to reveal something you've no idea about.

I am not sure if it's possible in first world countries but many countries where these companies will soon offer such investigative service to local intelligence/police department have very high chance to do exactly that.

If an actor were to go through that much effort to get DNA from someone, I doubt they would be concerned with the legalities of it.

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