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Comment by Ovah | Hacker News Reader

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Ovah

The sale of location data by carriers is a USA specific phenomenon afaik.

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It's not afaik.

idk if they sell user-specific data, but german operators DO at least sell agregate info from cell-tower usage.

At the moment.

No, in the EU it's a violation of your personal rights due to GDPR and in many EU Countries there are local laws that mirror this. This is very much an American failure to have democratic control over what large businesses do.

Location data is being collected and sold by EU carriers. They just "anonymize" and/or aggregate the data before they sell it. And hey presto, it's suddenly "GDPR compliant". Of course we all know that no anonymized is ever really anonymous, and that aggregated data can be just as problematic.

Couple of sources, in Dutch: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/118145/belgische-provider-proxim... https://itdaily.be/nieuws/infrastructuur/proximus-orange-en-...

thank you! I just found out i can opt out of this and did. However, selling anonymized data is better then selling non-anonymized data. Nevertheless, these carriers and the people who think this is in any way shape or form even remotely ok deserve to be stood in front of a wall...

can you explain how you opted out please? Thank you

i googled "anonymous data collection + $carrier + opt out" in german and they had a website

>no anonymized is ever really anonymous

Here's an anonymized email address, please tell me how to de-anonymize it:

    <redacted>@gmail.com

My point is that your hyperbolic statement is not true, and anonymization can be done correctly.

Location data isn't anonymous if you can follow the tracks of a single person throughout a week. Because where a person spends the majority of their time -- at work and at home -- are very personally identifiable. Then it doesn't matter if the dataset has "John Doe" or "<random id>" as the user identifier.

Don't believe "anonymous" data is shared like that? Look at what New York Times could do when purchasing one of these datasets.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...

Yes it's hyperbolic and home-brew encryption can be safe too. It just almost never happens.

<redacted>@gmail.com + pfundstein is how it almost always fails.

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