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Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

The public policy reason is that facts can't be copyrighted, whether that's a street address or GPS coordinates at 5:32 PM.

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It's a "fact" that a book has specific words in a specific order, yet we're not allowed to share that fact with other people without legal repercussions.

I fully understand laws are not written by computer scientists and that nuance is involved, I'm just saying that the idea that PII could be copyrightable doesn't seem THAT crazy to me.

> It's a "fact" that a book has specific words in a specific order, yet we're not allowed to share that fact with other people without legal repercussions.

Talking about the order of words in text X is not the same as a reproduction of text X.

Example:

Original: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Reproduction: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Talking about the order: In the sentence beginning with the following fair-use excerpt "The quick brown", the word "fox" precedes "dog".

> I'm just saying that the idea that PII could be copyrightable doesn't seem THAT crazy to me

It would be awesome, because then I could license out my address and collect royalties any time it is used or mentioned.

The first word of the sentence is "The". The second word of the sentence is "quick". The third word of the sentence is "brown". The fourth word of the sentence is "fox". The fifth word of the sentence is "jumped". The sixth word of the sentence is "over". The seventh word of the sentence is "lazy". The eighth word of the sentence is "dog".

Eight facts. Would replicating an entire book like this violate the copyright? The entire text is reproduced in order, there's just a bunch of junk added. I suspect courts would rule that it is a copyright violation.

Yea because your “fact” is literally a reproduction of the creative work with superfluous additions. Instead, if you publish a list of books and their unique word count it would be a collection of facts - and someone can copy your list (including mistakes) because your list isnt covered by copyright.

Producing a Mona Lisa with a mustache would therefore be a reproduction with superfluous additions then, eh?

That is a derivative work, unless parody.

Huh, one can obviously share snippets of paragraphs or pages for review and all for books. Same with address, it is snippet of information about a person and not the whole detail of everything in a house.

Yes, exceptions exist. But while you can use a small sample of a song in a review (say), you can't take the same sample and use it in your own song, even if it's just a few seconds.

Perhaps PII for commercial use could be treated differently than for private use?

You can measure the duration, key, BPM etc and publish that which are all facts.

A recording of a song (even if it falls under fair use) is not a “fact”, it’s information that took creativity to produce, multiple people working independently would not produce the same exact song - unlike going around and measuring the height of bridges where if multiple people did it they would arrive at the same measurement

Just as it's a fact that PI is 3.14 when approximated to 3 digits, it's also a fact that a particular recording can be represented by an MP3 file when approximated to about 3 MB.

One portion of our daily 10,000 steps will be to write out some copywritten works in the GPS path to make sure our data is doubly copywritten and should not be reproduced!

Per the US Constitution, right to privacy means sovereign control of my body, my self.

Since I am my data and my data is me, I already own all my PII.

We just want the legal system to honor this simple reality.

You can choose to not give away your data by not using those services. Boycott those services or help build competing privacy-centric services.

> You can choose to not give away your data by not using those services.

This is just plain wrong. There are privacy violating services where people are not given a choice. I don't have a Facebook account, but they bought tons of data about me from brokers and used to it to create a shadow profile that they continuously update using any scrap of information on me that they can find including what they can get out of the conversations held by my friends and family members who do have facebook accounts. What choice did I have in any of that?

Critical services and even government websites force you to hand information over to privacy hostile companies. You can't even go to irs.gov without pinging Google's servers, allowing them to collect data on you. Sorry, but "never use the internet again" isn't really a viable option and as long as you use the internet your data will be taken from you without your consent, or even your awareness. Choice, isn't really a factor.

To your point on family ties, potential DNA matching between relatives will not be avoidable. I wonder if there could be a constitutional amendment to protect us.

It's what we need, but it'd be a hard sell. The government loves being able to take all this data, even our DNA. (https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/04/baby.dna.government/in... and https://www.aclu.org/other/newborn-dna-banking)

What hope do we have of our government protecting us from their own actions?

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

Facebook (and others) make profiles of people that have never agreed to it, nor visited facebook in their lives.

So do the credit reporting agencies, to a different extent.

How could I have known GoodRx would sell my data to advertisers? I thought it was illegal for them to do so.

I am not familiar with that service.

If you work W-2, the payroll processor for your company likely gives your payroll details to theworknumber. This is ridiculous.

FTC Enforcement Action to Bar GoodRx from Sharing Consumers’ Sensitive Health Info for Advertising [2023/02/01]

Under proposed order, GoodRx will pay a $1.5 million civil penalty for failing to report its unauthorized disclosure of consumer health data to Facebook, Google, and other companies

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/02/...

GoodRx Response to FTC Settlement

https://www.goodrx.com/corporate/business/goodrx-response-to...

FWIW, I used to work in healthcare IT, mid 2000s. At the time, it was understood that sharing data for the purposes of marketing and advertising was illegal.

Also, being a geek somewhat familiar with stuff like tracking pixels, I'm still not sure what to make of GoodRx's response.

If I can't make head's or tails of this case, what hope does a layperson have?

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