Unfortunately many are fine with this because they believe it benefits their ideological group, which is more important than individual rights.
Sadly true.
A good example from this year:
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/22/capitol-riot-fbi-cellpho...
>...the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people...
I remember back in the day when this would outrage people.
After all, it's a conspiracy theory, which means it's verboten.
The press ran the story in my opinion half heartedly and imo forgave the transgressions because it was Obama in at the time. Most of the kick was directed right or wrong back to Bush.
It’s not like Brennan or Clapper or Rice or Yates ever faced even a degree of heat for directly lying to Congress about domestic spying.
I don’t at all disagree we live in a different world now, I just don’t have a perspective that this specific example was really that big at the time. Blurbs and tweets and Snowden Celebrity withstanding, the leaks had little to no actionable effect I can recall. I could be forgetting though.
-CNN
If you find a place where people don't think this way please let me know so I can move there.
Since the cell phone system literally cannot work without location data (base stations need to know where the handset is) the data will always be there. But there's no reason to store it for 2-5 years as is currently done by US telcos. A "fix" for this situation would be to limit the stored location data to, say, a week. Then there would be no incentives for the companies to sell the data.
There's a please clear justification for holding that data and making it accessible via a warrant.
What here needs reform is the warrant process, and more precisely, the incentive structures around policing.
US DAs/Judges/Police/etc. need to be independent and impartial. At the moment excessive US electoral "democracy" creates pathological incentive structures.
They'll do just fine after location data.
Especially with all the other digital breadcrumbs left around (security cameras and whatnot). If you don't think someone was somewhere they say they were there's a million other ways than phone data to check it out.
Besides, it's not like "oh look his phone was elsewhere" ever stopped police from investigating someone. They just assume you left it at home or gave it to someone for the purposes of an alibi.
I hear this sort of argument a lot, and often use it myself, but... did they? Sure, law enforcement existed and solved cases before they had access to location data, but are there some (more recent) cases that would have been unsolvable without it? Or has police efficacy not increased at all because of access to location data? Do we have data on this?
As much as I'm not positive on law enforcement in general, I think it's reasonable to have access to location data. But that access should be gated behind a limited-scope court order, and judges should not be rubber-stamping them.
On the other hand, it seems like any capability granted to law enforcement ends up getting abused, so I'm sympathetic to the idea of just banning all location data use.
Meanwhile it can and does put innocent bystanders (often minorities) at risk of arrest or defamation for simply being in the area.
>US DAs/Judges/Police/etc. need to be independent and impartial.
This is like wishing hell had an air conditioner.
Yes, in some cases this means a guilty person will go free but we have a long standing belief in western legal culture that it is better for some of the guilty to go free than to punish the innocent for the actions of the guilty. Invading everyone's privacy in the name of catching the small minority that engage in criminal activities is punishing the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.
One need to look no further than the widespread use of swat teams and no knock raids for mundane purposes, when even 50 years ago most cities didn't even have a swat team.
Kind of hard to justify the "APC maintenance" line item if the answer to "how much did you use that thing" is "never" so things like MRAPs and the swat team get used in situations they shouldn't be just to inflate their usefulness on paper.
I think that's a fine ideal (that I agree with), but I don't think any reverence for it is shared by many in law enforcement or the legal profession in general. Conviction rates are king, and incentives are often not aligned with true justice.
What you're arguing for here is to holding data on everyone for several years on the grounds that you might commit a crime in the future or be planning to commit a crime now. I'm OK with this for someone who has aroused sufficient suspicion to justify surveillance, but your approach makes mass surveillance the default condition.
That's not a justification, that's an argument.
A justification would involved evidence-based analysis of why the potential benefits (that you point out) outweigh the potential risks (abuse of process, targeting, etc.).
Given the current state of affairs (as you point out) it's not clear at all that the benefits win.
Note this is not an endorsement of the grandparent's policy view, just an explanation of how it can be applied.
They'd just sell it to the same buyer, or an intermediary, as it happens.
That's just not true. You do realize that they sell your live location data, right?
On page 2 of the bill, the definition of 'covered customer or subscriber record' includes the following:
(II) an intermediary service provider that delivers, stores, or processes communications of such covered person;There isn't like, a piece of evidence presented here that any of this will matter.
Wyden and others introduce bills of little substance all the time, they turn the best polling headline / title into bills.
So in one perspective this is just politics as usual. Wyden's idiosyncratic donor focus groups ranked this highest this month and we're only hearing about it because this is Hacker News, and on some other forum there's some other bill we don't care about but also polled well with some other senator's donor focus groups.
This isn't saying much, that legislation is reactionary, but it's interesting the specific mechanisms nowadays are super-representative, super-cheap focus groups and polling, enabled by services like Facebook and Instagram that these bills, ironically, target.
Do these bills advance the cause of privacy? I don't really need location tracking data to guess that most of the time, you're at home or at work.
And if you're eeking out such a subsistence existence that you don't have a permanent home or you're jobless? The bigger injustice is that the government has set an adversarial sight on you in the first place.
If companies want PII from their users, they should ask those users directly for permission. The legal test for a violation is straightforward: if a user can be de-anonymized from what the company shares along with public information.
California has made headway with CCPA, you don’t need many more states before it becomes the default without federal action.
There is momentum, and it’d be a shame to waste it.
Now if we could just do something about js popups...