Data broker is selling location data of people who visit abortion clinics | Hacker News Reader

Data broker is selling location data of people who visit abortion clinics

vice.com

125 pointsthamer97 comments

"It costs just over $160 to get a week's worth of data on where people who visited Planned Parenthood came from, and where they went afterwards."

This is why you should disable for all of your apps that require your location permission. If you have a weather app that has your permission, they're probably working with IBM to sell your location data.

Edit: forgot location just said permission.

Not just location, wifi and bt and probaly network as using wifi will generally give away a location too. It’s not easy.

My faraday cage phone bag is starting to seem less tinfoil hatty every week

For real - i have one of Pacsafe's[1] on hand for international travel where the phone tracking scares me even more than US' domestic situation

[1]: https://int.pacsafe.com/collections/rfid-blocking-wallets/pr...

That's why the Android "location" permission is needed for access to location services, Bluetooth, and WiFi.

I should have clarified, using wifi is enough as the isp's IP has been geolocated generally. Often, it's down to the building.

The only way a phone can't be tracked is turning off everything about it except candy crush

As long as spying on people is for some reason legal this will continue to happen. Phones need to ban location access for anything that doesn’t need location to function. Given we have them, App Stores need to ban apps that are spy.

You are forgetting that phones are pinging every tower constantly. Turning off location services is almost meaningless. The carriers know far more about you. If you want privacy, leave your phone at home or put it in a cage.

“We will never prevent murders, so making them illegal is meaningless. If you want to stay alive, stay at home”.

At some point a line needs to be drawn.

There's ideal and there's reality.

Do you deserve to get robbed and assaulted if you walk down a dark alleyway alone at night? No. But it's something you can avoid if you think ahead. There are people who will call this "victim blaming" but they are living in a land of magical thinking, not reality.

Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider and apps to know where you are going.

> Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider and apps to know where you are going.

Not to put words in their mouth but I think Kergonath's point is-

* Turn your phone off if you don't want your provider to know where you are going.

* Turn off your location services (and likely use a vpn, etc) if you don't want apps to know where you are going.

Yes apps _can_ still figure this out if they're trying that hard. I don't think this is in most people's threat model. If we want to go down that road then I'll point out there's ALPR's that track cars, and people who track bluetooth mac addresses your car likely has. Keeping your phone off until necessary is not realistic for most people. What you're suggesting is the equivalent of saying they should wait until morning to go through the alley.

> What you're suggesting is the equivalent of saying they should wait until morning to go through the alley.

Exactly. And yes, it depends on your threat model and how much you personally value your privacy. If someone wants to avoid leaving any footprint, more power to them. This should not prevent other people from enjoying better baseline privacy. We can have both: decent privacy by default, and possibly much better if you want to.

Sure, and lock your door when you leave home, that’s common sense. But it is not a reason to argue against outlawing burglary. I am not against taking precautions, though no precautions are foolproof and I have been mugged on a bus in bright daylight.

But I am against this edgy cynical idea that there is no point deciding rules because someone will circumvent them. Or that you are a naive idealist if you want better. Instead, what we do is we punish burglary, and it becomes rarer and rarer, and everyone lives better, even if one day you happen to forget to lock your door. Same thing for PII, and personal data in general. We should punish companies that are reckless with their data, and strictly limit the information access providers can log. This is not magical thinking, and is completely uncontroversial for medical or financial information. So why the phone cynicism (not from you, but from a large number of technophiles who ought to know better)?

The carrier doesn't know if you're in the abortion clinic or the chinese buffet is shares the strip mall with. You need GPS (or a much denser network) to have high precision.

Edit: and yes I know 5g increases the resolution, but it's still not that good since cell density correlates with "stuff" density"

good thing telecoms & phone manufacturers aren't trying to roll out such a network or anything like that

I should have phrased this differently. It wasn't meant as binary choice. Necessary but not sufficient. I was also just trying to say that I personally am more worried about the carrier than Apple.

"Also, don't forget that phones are pinging every tower constantly..."

Or, instead of just giving up on modern life and modern technology, we could express the appropriate level of outrage, and vow to make this kind of conduct a felony, and then vow to jail the people selling this data for 25 years or whenever their bodies reach room temperature, whichever comes first.

That would be another choice we could make.

You and I could make such vows all day long without changing anything about the world we live in.

Edit: I realized describing the paths forward to dealing with this sort of challenge requires more context than can be given in a short comment, so I'll work on that and come back with more later.

This is not a tech problem, tech won't fix it.

I'm about at the point of paying a teenager to buy me a pay-n-go phone from a convenience store with cash, in return I'll buy them the case of beer they always bug me for.

You don't even need location services to be on, wifi alone is enough to derive location if the app can tell what wifi networks you're near.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless

Which immediately raises the question of why an app has access to that info?

Well you see, because of a vague statement buried deep within a EULA, obfuscated with legal jargon, those people aren't being "spied on" - they are "knowingly and voluntarily sharing their data". And since more and more commercial activity is gated behind agreeing to one-sided, impenetrable legal tomes, what used to be felonies are now just a cost of living in modern society.

Don't like it? Go live in the woods. What you should not do is lobby for placing strict limits to contracts of adhesion (or even all contracts).

Another Vice article about the same thing [0]. It seems they have discovered that location data is sold.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vymn/cdc-tracked-phones-lo...

So it seems obvious that this is not the only questionable use location data is being put to. Businesses could buy location tracks on competitors to find out if they are having health problems or to blackmail them. Criminals could use it for blackmail. Foreign governments could use it for blackmail and to build contact networks for people of interest. People could find out which politicians attend neo-nazi meetings. Dead drops for bribery money could be discovered by journalists. Infidelities could be tracked. There are likely many many uses. Apparently the data is easily available. So misuse is likely widespread already. Much of the data is archived and could be mined for any use in the future.

Someone buy this and cross reference it with publicly available information about Republican lawmakers. I'm certain you'll find more than a few pings.

All uses of this information are bad; there isn’t an exception for alignment with your politics

Disagree. The exception is handy for getting laws passed, such as the VPPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

That law was a response to Robert Bork's video rental history being published during his confirmation hearings.

For the issue at hand, I'm well in favor of subjecting our lawmakers to the privacy breaches we all should be protected from. No better way to get them to act.

What's funny about the VPPA is that it's so narrow in scope, to the point where it must have been deliberately so. It's not like people were unaware in the late 80s of where the information economy would lead. Of course nothing like "ad tech" existed back then, but the fact that only a specific type of product purchase/rental was covered suggests that the law was never intended to actually protect consumers.

That was classic. Better we don’t care what you watch in the first place, though that won’t happen anytime soon.

You are not a moral arbiter. Moralism is relative - some people will find it quite ethical to make sure that the people in power are being held to the same standard as their constituents. Especially when those people in power are removing autonomy from people. AND especially when those people in power can keep their autonomy by ensuring they can travel to blue states or overseas in case they need more freedom.

This is how the country will end up in a civil war. Tit for tat never ends

It's not about tit for tat.

Some people have so little empathy that they can't identify with a situation until it happens to them. It's about showing them why this shit is a bad idea in literally the only way possible.

You mistake what the issue is in this thread. This isn’t D vs R or the 2 sides of the abortion legality issue.

This thread is about whether there is hypocrisy among the lawmakers and whether law should allow such sensitive data to be available for purchase. Data of this sensitive nature are fairly costly to violate for people governed by HIPAA, but few or no penalties for others.

I’m curious if any existing blackmail or cyberstalking statutes could cover the likely uses of these data.

In contrast, appeasement always ends -- in failure.

It does end, because real world antagonists are not the evenly-matched abstractions of game theory.

Consider an iterated dyadic game, but with a different weighting matrix for each participant, or a single matrix defining percentage rather than fixed payoffs. Chaotic factors aside, differentials will compound with iteration. It's NP-hard to say when (like predicting when or how a poker or a baseball game will terminate) but the fact that it will terminate is a very safe bet.

You are right that it might well end in war, but wars themselves are eventually won or lost (even if they have sequels). If avoiding war is your overarching goal, you need to minimize the fraction of the population experiencing life-and-death issues. If their self-assessment of their lives' net present value falls too low, they're incentivized to bet on reducing that of their opponents.

But wouldn't the equivalent be to say that baseball ends instead of a single game itself? And baseball doesn't seem to end.

Of course conflicts will end but the condition of victory tends to deviate from the original position.

Are civil wars the fault of the people who hold politicians accountable? The tit for tat here only works if the politicians arw actually up to shady stuff. Thats the issue

The tit for tat exists because there is nothing left binding your country together.

Do you not see there are now people with complete, diametrically opposed views on morality in your country?

The exact same thing, one person will look at it and see murder and another see nothing wrong. One will see transexuals in kindergarten and say “how brave” other will see a nightmare horror. One looks at your very government and sees either the far left or the far right.

Do you not see there is no such thing as the american people now?

Why do you keep pretending you are a country when you are clearly not. Why do you want to live with the other in the same country? Why do you want to force them to live with you?

> Why do you keep pretending you are a country when you are clearly not. Why do you want to live with the other in the same country? Why do you want to force them to live with you?

I'm unsure what else the nation could do with these people. Ship them somewhere else? One side is waiting for the other side to attrition out (Pew Research Voter Demographics corpus). What other options are available? Who else would want them?

The people who don't believe in the peaceful transfer of power and believe in subjugating the rights of others due to their own belief systems don't want to negotiate or compromise. How do you work with opposition who doesn't want progress, but only to make someone suffer? You cannot, so you lean into whatever will work.

“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be."

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

McConnell says he's '100 percent' focused on 'stopping' Biden's administration

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/mcconnell-says-he...

"The GOP's no-compromise pledge"

https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromis...

"4 In 10 Republicans Say Political Violence May Be Necessary"

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/11/966498544/a-scary-survey-find...

This started with Newt Gingrich decades ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi... This was built by design.

> “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

You don’t need to post articles, or, well, not to me at least. I didn’t go to the link. I won’t either. It doesn’t matter what it says.

What matters is it’s a vox article. Sending a vox article is like quoting a bible verse. I’m sure it is very meaningful to you. But to many other americans, it simply is not.

On the other side, if someone posted some right wing newspaper, it would be like them quoting the quoran at you. Surely it’s deeply meaningful to them, but, how can the quoran be true? The bible is true! They are stupid and their heads are filled with lies!

And they think exactly the same about you. You are the stupid one with the head filled with lies.

I’m sure you are convinced you are actually in fact right. You have “science” or “statistics” or “reputable journalists” on your side.

There are a million ways to convince one’s self of something. They are just as convinced as you.

As for your question

> What else would you have us do with them?

Work towards a peaceful breakup of the united states, based not on geography but on moral outlook.

It won’t happen though. So, I guess the tit for tat will continue and escalate until it gets to guns and worse.

—-

PS: When I wrote that I’m sure you are convinced you are right, the article spam was precisely the kind of thing I was trying to preempt. I’m sure all those articles support your point of view. I have no doubt. “The others” articles, they support their point of view.

Let me propose an experiment. For a whole week, do not consume your regular media diet and instead consume “the others”. Walk a mile in their mocassins as it were. Take it as an exercise in empathy.

> You don’t need to post articles, or, well, not to me at least. I didn’t go to the link. I won’t either. It doesn’t matter what it says.

> Let me propose an experiment. For a whole week, do not consume your regular media diet and instead consume “the others”. Walk a mile in their mocassins as it were. Take it as an exercise in empathy.

You're aware you wrote these two paragraphs in the same post, yes?

Yes, I am aware. Why are you asking?

They are implying that the statements are hypocritical when in the same paragraph

Here are the results of such an experiement.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/11/fox-news-viewe...

> In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police. Polls have previously shown that viewers of Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the US, are far more likely to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen than the average American, and are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19. By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: “It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin” and less likely to believe that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists”, when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News. The CNN switchers were also, as Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias reported, 10 points less likely to believe that Joe Biden supporters were happy when police officers get shot, and 11 points less likely to believe that it is “more important for the President to focus on violent protests than the coronavirus pandemic”. In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”

> The people in the experiment, Kalla said, were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republicans”. Given Trump had spent much of his presidency bashing CNN – a regular chant at his rallies was “CNN sucks!” – the results are particularly surprising. “A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment,” Kalla said.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/jrw26 (The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers)

Well, for the record i would be fine with the us splitting up honestly. But thats not what were talking about, were talkings about politicians who make abortions/morality things illegal then get abortions/those morality things themselves. I dont think either side is on board with that.

It’s not about views. It’s like with vaccination: one side is right, and the other is lunatics. Same with abortion: abortion ban is a moral equivalent of flat earth. It’s not a “view”, it’s organized stupidity.

You: "It's vitally important that we do nothing. We must keep the moral high ground - our own self-respect is much more important than winning."

How is this tit-for-tat? If right-wing lawmakers are banning abortion in their state, yet sending their girlfriends, daughters and mistresses out of state to have the procedure done, how is that tit-for-tat?

Considering this data is dangerous to far more innocent women and abortion doctors than Republican lawmakers, it doesn't seem very wise to gloat about it.

"Gloat?" More like "hold responsible."

I get that you're looking for a silver lining to this, but what you've found is micron of silver in a metric ton of pig shit.

Do you think these lawmakers will care enough to attempt to stop this from happening going forward, if it doesn't affect them personally? I do not. They have shown an almost aggressive lack of empathy.

I don't know how republican lawmakers will react. But I think this information has the potential to hurt far more innocent people.

> All uses of this information are bad...

If you believe that, using it on lawmakers is probably the absolute fastest, most effective, and best targeted way to limit the damage that can be done.

"We allowed the Republicans to destroy everything, but at least we have the moral high ground."

The moral use of this information is to abuse it in a legal way that gets data brokers regulated to prevent future abuse.

I didn't say this was good, I'm merely pointing out that this is an inevitability^H^H^Hpossibility now that the data is available. No moral judgement provided.

Maybe. But to get it to stop, you have to make politicians care more about the actual humanitarian issues than the money they get from special interests.

Waiting for an attacker to relent out of shame is a poor defensive strategy.

Tolerance of intolerance is intolerable [1]. Blowback is expected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

>Tolerance of intolerance is intolerable.

You say that as if it was some law written in stone, whereas it's nothing more than a thought experiment by an influential philosopher (which, in itself, is far from an absolute authority wrt how humans should behave).

> a thought experiment by an influential philosopher

Plus, this particular philosopher would very likely display a lot of intolerance against those proposing its usage so generously. And he would bite himself in the arse for even stating it because of course people misunderstand the meaning.

True, but every system needs some exception handling. The US Constitution is a long-running system but contains several broad exceptions relating to war because that's an existential problem.

Right. I think of the exception handling layer as the human part of a trial that is supposed to look at the spirit of the laws rather than the textual interpretation of them, but in practice it's far from perfect, I know.

Which is the tolerated here? Allowing abortions or not allowing abortions? Because obviously this phrase can be applied to both making it rather useless as a rationalization for either side.

Downvote away, it’s unambiguously true.

For what is worth, I think you are making a correct observation.

Another correct observation would be this. Aimed at the people saying this is breaking with precedent and it’s settled law that shouldn’t be changed.

The prohibition, which was written into the constitution, was repealed.

Nothing is set in stone.

Isn't there a difference between repealing a law by the legislature and the judiciary changing the meaning of existing laws?

What’s intolerable is being against abortions while simulatenously making use of that service. There's something just too hypocritical about being against medical procedures while personally benefiting from them, be it anti-vaxxers who are fully vaccinated, or anti-abortion activists who want to prevent others from having access to abortions while quietly going a state over and having one for themselves or their wife/girlfriend/mistress/daughter. If you're against something, fine, but practice what you preach. This is especially true for those preaching very loudly.

Hypocrisy never bothers politicians. For every activity X, the staunchest opponents of X will loudly defend their own X actions. Both sides are guilty of this. Laws are meant to bind one's opponents only.

No need. You'll also find their donors on the list. Pointing out how the rules don't apply to these guys isn't really new or interesting. When was the last time a member of the GOP lost their seat because of acting against one of the party's supposed tenants of family values, small government, liberty, etc.? Their voters simply don't care.

Great example of why this is so dangerous, there are people like you who are willing to exploit this data for political purposes.

In this case, this is planned parenthood attendance, but it could very well have been a political rally for your political opponents, that you could then use to get them fired.

John Oliver actually bought information from data broker to see if they could identify members of congress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA

Or their spiritual leaders.

Don't worry abortion will be illegal soon.

I have always wondered if in the long run it would have been better if Lincoln actually lost the Civil war. The Blue states would be free from the conservatives.

Even if Roe v Wade is appealed, that does not mean abortion will automatically be illegal. It means it will be left up to state governments to decide. California, for example, will almost certainly have legal abortion.

> I have always wondered if in the long run it would have been better if Lincoln actually lost the Civil war. The Blue states would be free from the conservatives.

Come on, abortion and slavery aren't even comparable. In one case people are potentially blocked from access to post-conception birth control, and in the other case actual humans were enslaved and bred for profit.

All States have to do is make a law that says if you travel for abortion you can be charged for murder if you come back to the state. That will tie a bow on fanatics fever dreams of no abortions under any circumstance.

Is that legal? My understanding is that they don't have jurisdiction beyond their borders. That would be like saying if you consume cannabis in a state where it's legal and then go back to a state where it's not, they could charge you.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/19/travel-abortion-law...

I don't think that will apply here. What those states are doing is pushing enforcement off onto private citizens, who aren't bound by Roe v Wade.

Private citizens can't enforce criminal penalties, so you can't use those kinds of laws to hand out prison sentences or executions.

Still a valid point about the expansion of anti-abortion laws, though.

> abortion and slavery aren't even comparable

Funny connection between the two regarding "who deserves human rights" though.

In the 1700s people said slaves weren't really fully human and deserving of rights. Today people say unborn babies aren't really fully human and deserving of rights.

Maybe someday civil rights will progress to include the unborn. It's taken centuries to get to a society where all races, all religions, all genders, etc have full rights, maybe in 2100 the unborn rights movement will win out and our grandchildren will think we were unimaginable bigots.

It doesn’t matter if fetuses are people. What does matter is if people who don’t want to be pregnant are people. Because abortion ban denies them their right to decide about their bodies.

Abortion ban is just yet another form of religiously motivated organized stupidity. It’s no different from LGBT discrimination.

Doubtful. Unless you think in 2100 that rape victims will be forced to carry babies to term and people will mourn early miscarriages as if a toddler died. I would be extremely surprised.

The leaked opinion is compatible with future US code that makes abortion federally illegal. It sort of goes out of it's way to not restrict federal power in the matter (despite going on and on about states' rights as a proxy for legitimacy from the citizens), but instead mainly attacks the idea of the constitution containing an intrinsic right to privacy.

Ideally neither should be of too much relevance and society should form a consensus. But otherwise a responsibility on the federal level makes much more sense if a consensus is formed and put into law. Not from the US though.

> Even if Roe v Wade is appealed, that does not mean abortion will automatically be illegal

I read somewhere that there are already a bunch of states (in the 20s) with laws on the books prohibiting abortions if the federal precedent disappears.

Heart of american liberalism right there. "Other people living under slavery is better than me having to deal with the political consequences of ending it."

Same shit continues really. The "blue states" might be "free" of "the conservatives" even now, but what about the people living in those states? Abortion isn't even that overwhelmingly unpopular in the south, those states are just gerrymandered to shit and under effective voter suppression. But hey that's their business right let's just leave them to it.

> The Blue states would be free from the conservatives.

And vice versa.

Time to freely disseminate lists of data brokers (and their acquaintances) who sell location data of people who visit abortion clinics.

Useful listing of the scumbags responsible: https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1521581893438754817

Also - is it just me, or did this one never got to the front page despite quite some upvotes?

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