Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...
A law that says the government can't ask for this stuff doesn't help very much. They'll ignore it when it suits them.
A law that says it's illegal for private companies to hand it over would be better. When caught between a request from the government and a law that says they're not allowed to honor that request, there's a good chance they'll obey the law rather than the rogue agency.
A law that says it's illegal for private companies to collect this data in the first place would be even better. It could still be worked around, but it's more likely to be uncovered, and they'd only get data after the point where they convinced a company to start collecting it.
What demand did DoD make of Anthropic that the latter thought would put it in legal jeopardy?
- you always denied those popups
- .. including any hidden legitimate interest sections that are being treated as a second, opt-out "consent" for things that really don't actually qualify as legitimate interest
- and the companies actually followed it
Then in theory the companies won't have that data. But doing 1 is tedious, companies exercise dark patterns to avoid you doing 2, and it's hard to audit if they've done 3, so most people are probably in those data sets.
Also, a government likely to buy this data for purposes like in the original article, is unlikely to be the type of government that goes around slapping companies for not complying with privacy regulation on that data.
The issue here isn’t simply “lack of privacy law.” It’s:
1. apps collecting precise location data in the first place,
2. adtech infrastructure broadcasting that data through RTB,
3. brokers aggregating and reselling it,
4. government agencies buying it to avoid the constraints that would apply if they tried to collect it directly, and
5. regulators failing to stop any of the above in a meaningful way.
European law is relevant to some of that, but not as a magic shield. GDPR and ePrivacy principles are obviously more restrictive on paper than the US free-for-all, especially around consent, purpose limitation, data minimization, and downstream reuse. But “on paper” is doing a lot of work there. Europe has had years of complaints about RTB specifically, and yet the adtech ecosystem did not exactly disappear. That should tell you something.
So the real answer is: yes, a stronger privacy regime can help, but no, this is not a problem that gets solved by vaguely importing “European-style privacy laws” as a concept. If the underlying business model still allows mass collection, opaque sharing, and resale of location data, then state access is a policy choice away. Governments don’t need to build a panopticon if the commercial sector already did it for them.
Also, the most important legal question here is not just whether private companies should be allowed to collect/sell this data. It’s whether the government should be allowed to buy commercially available data to do an end-run around constitutional and statutory limits. That is a distinct issue. You need rules for both the commercial market and state procurement, otherwise the state just shops where the Fourth Amendment doesn’t reach.
In other words, the contrast is not “Europe = protected, US = authoritarian.” The contrast is between systems that at least attempt to constrain collection and reuse, and systems that let surveillance markets mature first and ask questions later. Even in Europe, enforcement gaps, law-enforcement carveouts, and institutional incentives matter enormously.
So if the goal is to understand the story, the useful question isn’t “would Europe stop this?” It’s “what combination of collection limits, resale bans, procurement bans, audit requirements, and enforcement would actually make this impossible in practice?” Anything short of that is mostly aesthetics.
Unless you have some body which is a) serious about enforcement, b) sufficiently toothful to make a dent and c) not undermined by wider geopolitical posturing or economic neutering, you can have all of the regulation you might want and still end up in the same place. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try and control this, but that we have some extremely large genies to stuff back into bottles along the way.