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Comment by patrickm129 | Hacker News Reader

Brown also has their students cellular telephone numbers. It's feasible that the University acquired/purchased their students geolocation history via their mobile providers.

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The NYTimes [1] did an excellent expose on this a year ago. They purchased location data on 12 million phones across the country.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

It's crazy that wiretapping is illegal but this getting is not.

There is a saying that "if libraries did not exist for millennia, no government would create one in the 21st century. They would instead give people a means-tested tax credit for buying books and call it a day".

I think this sentiment applies to much more than libraries or infrastructure. Laws against wiretapping and opening postal letters are vestiges of the past. They never got updated when communication moved digital. They would not be passed today. They are kept on the books only because of inertia. If they didn't exist in the first place, no government would create them in 2020.

A government didn't create them in the first place, at least not in the US. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted by small committees, and later ratified by each state outside of the existing (paralyzed) governmental process.

Is that kind of information really for sale on an individualized level, by mobile providers? Surely they have brands to protect, and don't like being sued.

Putting on my tinfoil hat, I'll note that mobile providers depends on Brown University for antenna space on at least three tall campus buildings.

Yes, at least in the recent past.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunte...

They promised to stop, but I’m not sure I believe them.

Yes, in fact government agencies like the Secret Service [1], CBP [2], IRS [3], and others frequently purchase it to circumvent warrant requirements.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/secret-service-o...

[2]: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-warre...

[3]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7agpa/irs-location-data-ven...

The information being sold there wasn't from mobile providers, they were collected by apps. See the first paragraph of the third article: "location data quietly harvested from ordinary smartphone apps over 10,000 times". The same applies to the other two articles.

Why would they be sued? It's all right there in the contract in black and white.

And, naturally, all the customers carefully read through the contract. /s

I don't even know what could be done to stop this stuff at this point? I think it's too far gone.

A few years ago you could look up any cellphone number’s location on a public website:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...

Shouldn't there be like laws to protect against those, and a few huge class-action lawsuits, forcing the telcos to pay millions and millions of dollars because of that?

Yes. Call your representatives and campaign for new ones, or run propositions

I live in europe, we have many such laws, and noone can get that data. ...except government agencies, local and foreign spies, system administrators, etc.

Of course there should be. We stopped expecting them during the Reagan Administration because private industry would upset the entrenched monopolies that were keeping us down.

And safe. So now people think unions are icky and representatives that care about people rather than corporations are fantasy.

As the article states, WiFi monitoring is likely happening on a large scale. Why purchase outside data when you have better data (including authenticated users) already in house?

Does Brown require that its students have mobile phones?

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