Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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You're missing the point. Just because it's possible for that tracking to happen, it doesn't mean it has to happen. We could have strong privacy laws. Mobile carriers (and anyone else) could be required to not store this data at all, or at the very least delete it after a short time. We could have mandated surprise audits to ensure this actually happens. We could have significant, company-ending fines for non-compliance.

We don't, and that sucks. But it's not a binary choice between "you can carry your phone everywhere" or "you can avoid having your movements stored in a database indefinitely". There are other options that we as a society could choose, if we could get our acts together.

Sure, the opsec ideal is that you don't have to trust other parties in the first place. But honestly, for the vast majority of people, that sort of thing doesn't matter, and having strong, readily-enforced privacy laws would be more than sufficient to keep people safe and secure.

One problem is that such information can be useful for non surveillance purposes, for example: how they knew certain roads were congested before GPS was the mobile networks. I personally do not see anything nefarious about this, nor would I necessarily wish to see this kind of information as uncollectable. Such things are different from tracking specific individuals, yes, but it's not that different. It then becomes a matter of what, how much, and for what purposes the information can be collected, which can be somewhat moot since the government in all likelihood will give themselves an opt out anyway.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't try, or that it's futile, but rather that it's a daunting task: the only way to really defeat this is to not only regulate private entities but also the government itself. And the only way to do that is to make such surveillance political suicide. And the only way to do that is to get the people to care about privacy. Here in the UK, the public has more or less come to accept CCTV cameras being everywhere, with the government now introducing AI face-scanning cameras, which has not been met with much public resistance. And so I do have to echo what @everdrive said: "We've done this to ourselves". Whether it's about convenience or apathy or whatever, we've had the means to object to this and we haven't.

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