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Comment by stephbu | Hacker News Reader

Headline feels a little misleading, they didn’t track phones per se, they bought data from one of the dozens of cellphone data-brokers that continue to operate despite legislation and congressional action/in-action.

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Importantly this didn't give them the easy ability to pinpoint individuals for not complying with lock down. The point is to know how impactful policies were

Exactly! We need real privacy legislation, with consent framed similarly to the EU's GDPR. Without some type of general reform, every little bit of outrage about how our personal information is being abused is just a surface distraction.

Furthermore with regards to the misleading headline, apart from a few counties in California there were no "lockdown orders" in the US. There were closed businesses [0], and there were suggestions that individuals stay home. There were no widespread orders with the force of law telling individuals that they must stay in their homes.

[0] who I feel for, especially when things like small hardware stores had to shut down while Home Depot could remain open.

I was totally ready to make a "CDC, go fuck yourself!" meme when I read the headline.

Now, I can't decide how I feel. As a researcher (and someone interested in human behavior generally), it would be interesting to know how people reacted to the various measures attempted during the pandemic. On the other hand, the federal government analyzing the movement patterns of individuals is creepy-as-hell.

I'm left feeling like the headline, its submission here, and a lot of the discussion is more about propaganda than a serious discussion of the merits of this type of research.

Just because something is legal doesn't mean it is ethical. The CDC was acting unethically here, though I'm sure they feel everything they do is ethical because they are above question when performing their mission.

Pretty much every cellphone/app user dimension is available for a price on the open market. What you do think Facebook et.al, sells when an app user allows background tracking?

Is it unethical to study behavior of the populous? If anything bringing it into a clinical study probably brought more oversight in terms of ethical handling, and aggregation/anonymization of data than the source would provide.

Facebook sells targeted advertising, they don't sell the underlying data AFAIK?

Ads is just one of their businesses, consider FBLogin and 3rd party data-access e.g. full-name, date-of-birth, email address, friends, the list goes on...

I don't use FB, but don't you typically have to explicitly opt in to this kind of sharing?

There is a world of difference between that and companies you can't really opt out of doing business with if you want to live in mainstream society (cell providers, banks, etc.) making you click 'agree' on some 50k line dump of legalese and then selling granular, non-anonymous personal data to anyone willing to pay.

Frankly, the hysteria around "Big Tech" "selling your data" is misplaced and probably paid for by the lobbying arms of the real abusers. "Big Tech" is far from blameless, but it's a teddy bear compared to how other industries treat us.

I spent a couple of decades in big-tech, and of-that did adtech for about 5yrs - we captured, aggregated, cooked out activity streams from billions of toolbar, browser, and beacon events per day, for real-time, long and short-term user profiles for around a couple of hundred million people - primarily for feeding the ad-exchange behavioral targeted ads. Back then about 80% of the active internet users. This was a huge business even back then - billions.

Since then the world and his wife have captured data and inserted telemetry beacons everywhere. Consider how many services you use that are today subsidized by “anonymized” selling/trading/sharing/merging user event streams - the TV your watching, your cellphone provider selling user behaviour data, even your ISP is selling your DNS lookups - they’re all at it now. Worse, mobile has made it much easier to install platform frameworks that offer developer features in return for data-collection such as location, user profile etc.

I don’t think it’s overblown - that “anonymity” isn’t that anonymous when you add enough dimensions - you just haven’t seen how massive the data broker business is.

My point is that the companies usually referred to as "Big Tech", e.g. Google, FB, Apple, etc., are generally not the ones participating in this kind of unrestrained exchange of PII and sensitive personal data for money. They generally keep their user data on their own servers, and use it to power ad targeting platforms.

The things you are talking about (e.g. smart TVs, cell providers, ISPs) are the things I am saying are actually bad. For some reason they don't get nearly as much attention, despite being far worse.

> What you do think Facebook sells

Facebook doesn't sell data. They place ads, but the data stays in-house.

How is the CDC's behavior here unethical? Every person involved has consented to everything involved. Just because you personally don't like it doesn't mean people aren't allowed to willingly give up their privacy. That's how freedom works.

Okay but you can't take someone to court for being unethical-- and the government in my experience doesn't care much if you complain they're not ethical. So while I don't disagree I'm not sure what the effect of this actually is, if any

It's too bad about the headline. When I see something like that, it's hard to tell what in the article is factual and what is hyperbole.

I also take issue with the liberal use of the term "lockdown". As far as I can tell, the only thing close to a lockdown was issued for a time in San Francisco. Everyplace else just barred indoor gatherings. You could go outside as much as you pleased. And even businesses were open for takeout or reduced occupancy.

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