FTC takes action against Gravy Analytics, Venntel for selling location data
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288341 ("My Phone Was Spying on Me, So I Tracked Down the Surveillants", 170 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896456 ("CBP Refuses to Tell Congress How It Is Tracking Americans Without a Warrant", 98 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32689862 ("[Here's] The Manual for the Mass Surveillance Tool Cops Use to Track Phones", 96 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24709347 ("The IRS is being investigated for using location data without a warrant", 80 comments)
We really need a leak of tracking data on Congresspeople going to compromising places to make this happen.
Oh, for horror! That might mean more banners on websites....
I am of the opinion that at this point, Americans only believe we are less surveilled than people elsewhere. It’s not visible so people forget about it. Yet it is so deeply embedded into the government that it will never be removed.
Is this actually an old saying?
We are all forced to buy a car. There is no one with a gun to our head forcing such a purchase, or a law specifically requiring you to buy a car. But nevertheless the laws are structured so that everyone realistically must buy a car, whether they want to or not.
If you chose not to buy a car then your life will be dramatically more expensive and difficult to live, because of the network effects of this requirement.
So while you are technically free to not buy a car, realistically you are forced to do so.
Is that approximately what you mean?
That depends where you live. In Chicago, for example, your life will be simpler and less expensive if you don't own a car.
Now, for people that choose to live in the further reaches of suburbia where things are not nearly as close, then cars become more of a need. But that is a decision when location to suburbia or further was made.
If you happen to live in one of the numerous cities in the US that has a hollowed out core, you need a car even if you live downtown. And often the cities that have vibrant walkable downtowns are expensive to move to.
I will grant that I was within walking distance of the last stop on the local metros subway system so maybe some people wouldn’t consider that the suburbs, but it was considered so for the city.
Also just broke 20k miles last week on my vehicle I bought in 2021 after moving to the countryside so it’s not like ive
Examples include individual shops that used to be called markets which are not farmers markets or supermarkets, basements in all/most homes, and town halls being an expectation of normal governance rather than a newsworthy event
This comment comes across as incredibly privileged, to be honest. Most people must drive to work. Asking them to use Uber for such a purpose is just… it’s kind of infuriating.
humans are social creatures, of course if everyone else has a car it is going to be inconvenient for you to not have one. this is not a solvable problem
It might seem like a moot point in San Francisco where there is free public transit, but in cities like mine, there is an intentional lack of alternatives, in order for cars to be leveraged as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary.
This is obviously incorrect from a quick glance at history.
Long distance travel in the US used to occur primarily by train. Short distance travel used to occur by walking and streetcar.
Now, with suburban sprawl (a relatively recent phenomen), we have something we could call medium distance that is filled in some areas by light rail.
We now also have other options for very long distance travel: aircraft.
In my small town, we have roughly 125 people. We are, roughly, 35 minutes away from the nearest grocery store, or about 40 miles. Too long to walk or bike in a reasonable time. You could use a motorized bike but the amount of food for a family would be unwieldy. The only viable solution is to drive via car, because you need the trunk space. And both options to get there require roads. Now, let’s suppose we magically replaced highways for rails. What happens is simple: either the government is bleeding immense amounts of money orchestrating train rides to places where no one is regularly using it, or certain less populated areas are underserved.
The majority of Americans trying to get from A to B are driving less than 60 km/day, a distance which trains can cover pretty damn fast.
For longer travel you could have high speed trains on both coasts' corridors, very few people are traveling NYC -> LA on a regular basis, most people will travel on their surroundings (500-1000 km).
You could have a multimodal system covering the most important urban corridors, rural places would almost always need cars due to the low density but it's a big fat lie that the USA is car-centric because it's the only solution for its size.
The only reason you are a car-centric country in 2024 is because of incentives for the car industry, the design of your cities being stuck in car-centric mindset from the 1950s-1960s.
You don't need to give up cars completely, you just need infrastructure to not require a car for people traveling around your major urban centres. High speed rail corridors between Seattle - Portland - San Francisco - Los Angeles - Las Vegas - Phoenix, another corridor from Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - Baltimore - DC branching out to Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit - Chicago. With those you cover a lot of the major economic centres.
China is also massive and they've managed it.
Except for some new shiny skyscraper, the USA feels more backwards each time I visit, like the country is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and refuses to be updated to how a modern country can be in 2024.
I'd say it's more NIMBY interests than corporate interests.
The US, in contrast to Asia and Europe, builds sprawling suburbs, consisting only of single-family houses, with no multi-story apartment complexes and no other services/infrastructure in walking distance.
Most people would tell you that they don't want things to be this way, but will actually complain about proposals to make things better.
If you build apartment complexes, you can fit more people in a smaller area, which makes public transit a lot more economical. Add the fact that you don't need to go anywhere far at all for a lot of things, like grocery shopping for example, and that makes you need a car a lot less.
It's also worth considering that the US has been constantly rich for the last century or so, it has been far less affected by the second world war, dictatorships and communism than Europe and Asia, which made cars a lot less of a luxury, and hence made public transit a lot less of a necessity.
Leveraging cars as a self-reinforcing socioeconomic class boundary is a direct consequence of all of this, but also one more (self-reinforcing) reason why people need cars. You just can't do that sort of thing in Europe, if there are well-off people without cars, you can't assume that well-off people have cars, so well-off people will keep not having cars, and so it goes.
But the moment you question the status quo, or try to go against it, you find yourself targeted by corporate and social violence. You might lose your job, the respect of your peers, your family, house, car or more.
Here is an easy example:
A portion of your tax money is funding genocide and anti-democratic military coups in Israel and other countries.
If you decide (as any rational citizen should) to no longer pay income tax knowing that you lack any discretion over how it is spent, and you decide to demand a more transparent and restricted tax system, then the government will threaten you with economic hardship and even prison. They will surveil and discredit you if you receive any modicum of notoriety, just as they do to sociopolitical activists and protestors.
You won't be able to operate a business while opposing income tax laws, and thus conscious political action is relegated to the elite, who don't need to work, and the poor, who already don't significantly benefit from the system. The rest of the working class is forced to play ball, or lose everything.
That's not freedom, even if it looks like Freedom™ to a certain class of bootlickers who are conditioned to maintain the status quo, even if it means turning on their neighbor.
Do you mean lack of government subsidies supporting better public transportation? Or something else?
The lack of subsidies certainly don't help. Neither does the insatiable appetite for new cars.
Just race and sex baiting with vague allusions, but not actually a specific example when asked…?
Try driving while not white in certain cities and see how free you feel. Try being a naturalized citizen or first gen to see how free you are in certain cities. Try being a female and looking to make your own health care decisions in certain states. Are these less vague allusions enough for you?
Freedom does not mean the opposite of being in jail. There's a lot of freedoms that are taken away from people purely based on race/sex whether you want to call it baiting or not. They still exist as problems.
No, not at all. For example, plenty of white people feel unwelcome in areas — but neither group is prohibited and in both cases the experience is generally a) in their own head because nobody thinks about other people and/or b) cultural because there’s members of that community who don’t experience the same.
> Try being a female and looking to make your own health care decisions in certain states.
When your rights intersect another’s rights is always a matter of law — I’m not free to kill others outside legislated confines, either.
> There's a lot of freedoms that are taken away from people purely based on race/sex whether you want to call it baiting or not.
Then you should list some, rather than give vague and untrue grievance narratives.
Sometimes I found it funny seeing people feeding fish to octopus, calming they are sentiment, and supporting abortion.
Surely no sane person would think "Octopus > Baby > Fish". We are just inconsistent, and never admit we are that inconsistent.
One example that's a bit more concrete is the combination of pre-trial detention and plea bargains. These form, in effect, a punishment for exercising one's right to a fair trial, a punishment that exists because our court system is quite far from having the capacity to properly handle the sheer volume of prosecutions that occur [5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
[2] https://pen.org/report/chilling-effects/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver
[5] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/26/plea-bargainin...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-i...
Government death panels? Orwellian, literally 1984, communist, socialist. Your insurance company refusing to cover your cancer treatment? Well that's the free market bub, can't argue with it. Sorry you're gonna die.
Like I'm being hyperbolic, sure, but I am being that hyperbolic?
You’ve been duped.
If the services aren’t available to anyone due to resource issues that’s not the same as a death panel deciding you’re simply not worth covering. If there is a shortage, resources have to be allocated somehow whether or not there is a public option.
> If the services aren’t available to anyone due to resource issues that’s not the same as a death panel deciding you’re simply not worth covering.
Resource issues because they don’t have the funding to pay for additional care of this type. Allowing private funding pushes the demand curve out and increases quantity supplied of the scarce resource.
Your link does nothing to disprove the scenario I am describing because I was describing a covered cancer procedure that the govt can use discretion to block you from purchasing in Canada.
In a private system, those with money can prioritize themselves over those without it. In the US this results in huge numbers of people who lack basic care, and a small group of people who can pay large sums for care with diminishing returns. Consequently, Americans live shorter lives than Canadians.
What you are describing is a law that prevents a person from paying to skip other people in line. It seems like a pretty good idea to me.
regardless, we have moved on to this argument because the original point is absolutely true: public systems intrinsically make it illegal to seek care out of the system.
https://globalnews.ca/news/10118619/bc-cancer-agency-wait-ti...
+1 Your eyes don’t open for any reason. +1 You can't speak or make sounds. +1 You don’t move in response to pressure.
So you get points for existing, and the tests can include causing pain (pinch ear, press nail bed, knuckles to chest [depending on jurisdiction]) to make someone have movement.
However, while GCS of 3 is the bottom of the GCS chart, it's not the only measurement used.
"Conclusions. We believe that patients with blunt head injury presenting with a GCS score of 3 should be treated aggressively. Our results showed that 50.8% of these patients survived their injury and 13.2% achieved a good functional outcome at the 6-month follow-up." - NIH
My favorite part of GCS: Emergency care books say "don't worry you don't have to memorize this, you'll always have a chart", yet calculating it exactly is on 2 different US emergency care national exams.
I have never heard a serious suggestion for the government to ban private insurance in the US.
Even in “communist” China where the government negotiates drug prices, people can buy private insurance.
Unless you can demonstrate concrete ways in which it even inconveniences someone, it’s gonna fall pretty low on most people’s priorities.
I'm not sure who believes that (Hollywood/any cop tv show would have you believing the opposite), but I'm also skeptical that these data brokers are only brokering US data.
Hollywood and cop TV would have you believe that "zoom, enhance" is a legitimate means of surveillance. I suspect most educated Americans avoid framing their understanding of surveillance around CSI and SVU.
We had a bank robbery here recently and the getaway car was captured on the bank's outside cameras, and using Flock the police quickly localized where the car was to within a few square blocks. They found it within hours and arrested a suspect. In this case it was a good ending, but it's not hard to imagine how this could be misused, or mistakenly put an innocent bystander under suspicion.
Combine this with most private businesses and many homes now having cameras watching activity on or about the property, and I'm not sure most people realize the extent to which they are surveilled in 2024.
"Public camera" (as in state/city owned) is the least of my worries -- I know who I should sue when the data are leak.
Many camera just put all footage on in some unsecured server in China or public S3 bucket .
Even here in HN there is a blithe dismissal of the import of constant surveillance.
What happens when they come for you, though? You spoke out at a town hall meeting and now the mayor wants to run you out of town, or worse.
> I know who I should sue when the data are leak.
Sure, and from Equifax et al we know what you’ll get - a year of free credit monitoring.
I would love examples showing that I should be less cynical.
What you’re describing doesn’t sound like a technology problem. It sounds like a people problem or a political problem. Technology can’t solve that. It is functionally equivalent to a person telling the mayor what you said.
Maybe a better example would be the facial recognition software quickly becoming ubiquitous https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition...
I’m still in favor of it though. Safety is a high priority for me and the US is much more dangerous than I’d like. I’m much more worried about criminals than the government.
I think the implication is that ubiquitous cameras and other surveillance technology would make it easier for the mayor to have you harassed until you leave town.
[0] https://www.404media.co/email/f459caa7-1a58-4f31-a9ba-3cb53a...
Is there some actual law that this is based on? I am sympathetic to arguments that this should be a law, and is sketchy and gross, but the legal requirement of active consent for geolocation data seems to be something the agency is just declaring to be true and daring lawsuits to challenge.
I'm pretty sure that this is exactly how it's supposed to work. Federal agencies like the FTC have (had?) the authority to make rules and reinterpret existing rules with the force of law.
In the (present) US government, it really can't work any other way. Without this sort of autonomy, any action by the FTC, EPA, etc would require congressional approval, which would mean that they effectively would never be able to function at all. Law moves far, far too slowly. FTC needs autonomy to go around the law to react to rapidly changing markets and technologies. Notionally their actions should be codified by Congress after the fact, but Congress is incapable of doing anything useful within 20 years.
Especially after recent supreme court decisions, which I support, Congress has to give an agency specific authority within defined boundaries in order to make regulations which have the force of law.
Congress doesn't have to get down to the very specifics (like for example emissions standards numbers for cars), but it does have to be specific enough (can't say: EPA, you're responsible for environment stuff, make whatever laws you feel like).
For example the origination of the FTC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_Act_o...
The legislation charges the FTC with preventing unfair business practices, defines what it means by unfair, and then gives authority to address these things through administrative actions or the courts.
1) Congress members are (generally) not experts outside of law and will probably leave out some word somewhere and then the new regulation gets overturned as the court rules it not in the agency's purview because congress forgot one thing.
2) Congress has been ineffective almost to the point of complete deficiency in the past 10 years, and will likely not pass many new regulations requiring specificity.
The solution to Congress being ineffective is not strengthening the executive to make law.
I don't want to live in a country ruled by bureaucracy driven by a dictator.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a61711288/automakers-sold-...
Honda sold their users' data for 26 cents per car.
Hyundai sold their users' data for 61 cents per car.
Whether or not that data is used to affect insurance premiums is hard to ascertain, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere in the world was affected by it.
and if they did obtain it, this data should have trackable provenance, should be revokable, and there should be payment and royalties to the user for its use and continued use
this data will self-destruct in five seconds?
unless you plan on making it DRM protected, how else do you make data revokable? it's just text that can at worst be screen scraped into whatever format they want/need. plus, as we all know, DRM encryption keys tend to have a way of being broken or discovered or whatever other method of being rendered useless.
we can just copy a regulatory regime seen in other industries: non-compliant offerings are outright illegal and anyone trading in it can be sanctioned outright, while compliant offerings have this feature set.
the feature set can have a standardized way of tracking provenance, which the user can look at and revoke its compliance if desired, by signing a cryptographic signature that produces the expected address that approved consent to begin with. the same address's public key would be used for royalty payment. there are many examples of this working in standardized ways in some networks.
They left a loophole, sounds like nothing will change.
The consumer has a phone, they obviously consented - hardly passing through the eye of a needle.
I mean, it won't matter come January 21st, but it's a nice thought.
The loss of chevron does not end regulation. It creates a morass of inconsistent and inexpert judicial inturpretations. It was the worst supreme court decision in decades.
That's saying a lot considering that the presidential immunity decision is going to create the same kind of uncertainty surrounding presidential conduct which is likely not going to be resolved for decades.
But yeah, the inconsistent rulings from the bench will be a total dumpster fire.
With Chevron in place, that imperfection was somewhat managed by deferring to the experts in the executive branch who were tasked with implementing the rules provided by Congress.
Without Chevron, a non-expert judge has to decide whose experts they believe.
Additionally, the removal of Chevron opens to doors to a massive number of cases that likely wouldn't be filed under Chevron. So, we're also adding caseload to an already overburdened justice system.
If this can all be second-guessed in court, then it becomes more of a crap shoot based on a series of judges’ rapport with the selected experts du jour, who are selected primarily based on the suitability of their opinion, rather than their expertise.
If you believe the government is usually wrong or often acting in bad faith, you might applaud the overturning of Chevron.
If you think the executive should be allowed to implement the often vague directives from Congress without fear of being overwhelmed in court, then you might think the overturning of Chevron will kill the government’s ability to function.
Personally, I’m not keen on the end of Chevron. But it probably isn’t going to lead to complete dysfunction either.
If the regulator is wrong or corrupt 1% of the time, it's good that the victims have legal recourse. The existence of that recourse will also make the regulators more likely to do honest work.
Guys… if the government tells you to do something and you disagree, you could always take them to court.
I applaud your patience.
This is why I like the Chevron decision a lot!
It’s a balancing act and I fear overturning Chevron shifts the balance to far in the other direction.
This ruling is a power grab by the court that says congress must write explicit rules and can't delegate authority to agencies to determine how to execute a mandate. The ethics rules and enforcement structure for those rules are much more strict for employees of government regulatory agencies than for the supreme court justices. If you are concerned about power corrupting, this seems like a very bad decision.
The bar to overturning those executive rules is now potentially much lower.
Take the ATF's bump stock ban (overturned prior to Chevron being killed, IIRC)... - Congress has effectively banned machine guns (for normal people to own) - ATF decides bump stocks make machine guns - Bump stock owner sues ATF, claiming they overreached - Courts initially upheld ATF rule (deferring to ATF experts) - Appeals courts overturned lower court ruling, claiming bump stocks don't meet the definition spelled out by Congress.
As much as I hate it, the appeals court is technically correct. The law passed by Congress was narrowly tailored and bump stocks don't meet that rule.
So, this was a case where Chevron was actually "worse" than "no-Chevron".
But, it's easy enough to imagine the reverse. Congress says "hey EPA, make the air clean!" with little or no guidance on the mechanism they want followed. EPA does its best, but now gets sued by any big industry that wants to pollute. With Chevron in place, implementing that vague law is still possible. Without it, EPA does it's best and often ends up losing to the other side's experts (and very likely the various districts decide differently, leading to inconsistent application of the law across the country, until/unless SCOTUS takes a case).
The simple answer is to require Congress to write detailed laws. But, that's not really possible (given the scope of the government). And exacerbated by the dysfunctional state of affairs we've seen in Congress these last few decades.
Either way, neither option sounds particularly favorable to me.
But the career bureaucrats? I’m not convinced.
You could always appeal the rulings from federal agencies in court and that's how we lost chevron [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
Probably one of the best in decades... Seriously how did we get to the point that hacker news of all places is fondly dreaming of a near presidential dictatorship where rule making doesn't even need the legislative branch.
Its not like the agencies could just do what they want prior - they generally had to follow the policies with freedom to interpret vague laws, and its up to congress to pass more clarifying laws.
The Chevron doctrine overruling wasn't taking power away from the executive branch, it was a backup plan if Democrats won, the Supreme Court can have power against the incoming administration. It should be pretty evident that the Republican Justices are solely in MAGA territory, considering Trump vs US ruling.
It does not eliminate the ability to make and enforce rules if those powers/rules are clearly within the scope of the law.
I have no idea about this FTC decision on this second point but agency lawyers tend to be pretty careful about such things.
Removal of Chevron effectively means a judge then gets to second-guess that interpretation. Previously, they were supposed to defer to the SMEs in the executive.
I get that passing laws is hard but that is one of the reasons to have agencies!
Chevron was not carte blanche either.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2123035gravyana...
As I skim that it just feels like a pile of shit that does nothing but create a few jobs to make reports. It doesn't bind the management. They can literally go do the same thing tomorrow.
Oh wait... "Gravy Analytics is now part of Unacast!"
Why isn't Unacast a party? Where is the monetary fine?
> "II. Prohibitions on the Use, Sale, or Disclosure of Sensitive Location Data IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Respondents and Respondents’ officers, agents, and employees, whether acting directly or indirectly, must not sell, license, transfer, share, disclose, or otherwise use in any products or services Sensitive Location Data associated with the Sensitive Locations that Respondents have identified within 90 days of the effective date of this Order as part of the Sensitive Locations Data Program established and maintained pursuant to Provision III below."
It's true of course that corporations often collect and sell this data to the government, so we should focus instead on the data collection at it's source - on our devices. However the data is collected, and whoever collects it - the government will get and use it for their own purposes.
Corporations just want to sell you more stuff. The government wants to control you.
Another way is to use your data to help them become a monopoly and/or manipulate you.
It’s not “sell more stuff”, it’s “assist governments and extract money by any means, including robbing you”.