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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

It's time to put an end to these attempts at geolocating Internet ussers. A website shouldn't know where I am connecting from unless I willingly provide that information. It's inevitably used against the user to track him, profile him, or restrict his freedom in some way.

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Tracking and restricting the freedom of criminals is critical to a healthy society.

Criminals makes the smaller percentage of people on the internet. And in the real world it's usually the case that a warrant or other order backed by investigation and evidence to justify the information collection.

In fairness, even offline they don’t have warrants. They just say, “reasonable suspicion”. I don’t know what the solution is, but trying to hide behind legal niceties is not going to get us very far. At least it hasn’t gotten US citizens very far in the past.

That said, if it makes you feel better, Palantir already likely has, or can infer/calculate, your geolocation in any case. So this isn’t necessarily giving anything new away. All it does is highlight the creeping trampling of our privacy rights.

Only in limited circumstances. The strongest legal defense is to attack the procedures and legal bullet points in the process. Didn't get that form proving chain of custody between these two parts? Oh, too bad, out the window that evidence goes. It might be possible to harass someone without warrants and paperwork, but securing a conviction at least for the moment still requires evidence gathered according to the law, or parallel construction to obscure the origin of the evidence.

Not allowing criminals to dictate how everything works for the rest of us is also critical to a healthy society.

Well, I have bad news about the people ruling Western society.

And how could you be doing any of that with a tool as unreliable and coarse-grained as GeoIP?

Oh I see, anything is justified, as long as it's "for the children" or to "catch terrorists."

> Tracking and restricting the freedom of criminals is critical to a healthy society.

Under such an excuse, any type of extreme measure is similarly allowed.

In fact, why not go full Suicide Squad and strap bomb/shock collars to every person on Earth?

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