It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells itself.
Edit: It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells us.
Let's add around 5 million for man made famine, and probably a 2 million for arbitrary executions and deportations, while many estimate the full death count as between 15-20 million
As far I can understand the top range of estimates for CECOT, which is a non American facility, are that 500 died, of around imprisoned 20,000 inmates. So the scale is a bit... different
I think the issue here is that contrary to popular belief, not every wrong thing is the same
If we just look at incarceration rates:
CECOT is one facility, but around 2% of El Salvador's population has been imprisoned by Bukele's operation.
In 1950 the USSR had a population of around 180 million, and the gulag system was at its height with a population of 2.5 million, very similar.
The US prison system has been around 1% from the peak of the War On Drugs until recent fads in liberalized sentencing, currently holding at 0.7%, one of the highest in the world if you exclude ethnic purges like Xinjiang or Gaza.
Apart for the fact that people were released from El Salvador system, the population percentage is wrong for El Salvador, USSR and US, the difference between slavery camps and a penal system, Gaza not being a prison.
But what are you really saying, that the 200-500 dead in El Salvador, most non associated with Trump, makes Trump equivalent with Stalin's 15 million dead? Does that make sense?
You state that I have errors - could you point them out?
"The scholarly consensus affirms that archival materials declassified in 1991 contain irrefutable data far superior to sources used prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the archival revelations, some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin's regime were 20 million or higher. After the Soviet Union dissolved, evidence from the Soviet archives was declassified and researchers were allowed to study it. This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953), around 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, some 390,000[ deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s, with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories. According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility. The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes included with the victims of the Stalin era." [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_under_Joseph_...
I would argue for the generality of this characterization
Then it's not anonymous.
Simple as that.
If it can be "de-anonymized" then it was never anonymous to begin with.
"De-anonymized" is quite literally an oxymoron.
I'm using your definition.
> Does it map to a single, identifiable person or something close enough that the distinction is meaningless?
Also
> If it can be "de-anonymized" then it was never anonymous to begin with.
Well sure, that's the point I was trying to make in my rhetorical question above. Individual pieces of data may be "anonymous" but put together with other anonymous data that can be traced to a single source and suddenly you can figure out quite easily who this person is. The data itself is still technically anonymous but it can be pieced together.
https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105
If movie ratings are vulnerable to pattern-matching from noisy external sources, then it should be obvious that location data is enormously more vulnerable.
Is Location data highly dimensional though?
waiting for legislation or eulas to fix this is a lost cause since adtech always finds a loophole. the fix has to be architectural. moving toward stateless proxies that strip device identifiers at the edge before they even hit upstream servers. if the payload never touches a persistent db there is literally nothing to de-anonymize. stateless infra is the only sane way forward
why would someone include tech that makes people think twice about using the app, unless it is required if you want to "sell" in a particular venue.
if your developing geolocation based apps, location tracking is a core function.
a calender, absolutely does not require location tracking beyond what side of the prime meridian are you on.
But the subsequent sale of that data is not—is the discussion here.
you cant sell what you dont have unless you lie lower than a rug.
fix the data collection problem and a second order effect of no data for sale emerges.
Because the overwhelming majority of people don't think twice about this tech.
I do, and that's why I use a lot of web tools or old-fashioned phone calls, but most people think metadata=unimportant and assume that the purpose of the app is what it does for them rather than to gather their personal information for sale.
Even if Google and Apple both want to commit to fighting this, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, because there are all sorts of different ways to track users that the platforms can't control.
As an easy example: every time you share an Instagram post/video/reel, they generate a unique link that is tracked back to you so they can track your social graph by seeing which users end up viewing that link. (TikTok does the same thing, although they at least make it more obvious by showing that in the UI with "____ shared this video with you").
Is there not also a requirement for clean consent? Ie a weather app can’t track your precise location?
I think a lot of people don't realize the power of a big enough sample size. With enough samples even something pretty innocent looking like your daily step counter could make you identifiable.
As far as I know we don't have large enough databases to make this happen in practice, but I don't think this is impossible in the future.
The analytic reconstruction of identity from location is far more sophisticated than the scenarios people imagine. You don't need to know where they live to figure out who they are. Every human leaves a fingerprint in space-time.
It's not though.
Critical for myriad elective purposes? Sure.
Could you be more specific with maybe a single example of where my physical geographic location is electronically critical for a purpose that isn't elective/optional/avoidable?
(And I'm not just trying to be obtuse. I think you're touching on at least part of the 'heart' of both this conversation and that of digital ID verification.)
Edit: I assume I am missing a crucial part of logistics that you’re familiar with, genuinely curious.
Alone, these points are not deanonymizing, it's when there's other data associated.
A lot isn't good enough.