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h2odragon
Im confused, it was just a few weeks ago that this data being widely available was "open society" and everybody suspected of Trumpism having their location data checked to see if they'd been near the capitol was "open source intelligence..."

I think I have to disagree in principle with the author here; The gun maker isn't responsible for the murder committed with it; the data vendor isn't responsible for the use or misuse of it, and the person who makes the SQL query work isn't responsible for the decisions others make based on what it shows.

I'd certainly be happier with this kind of capability better controlled if it must exist but then look at the places where those tight controls and public scrutiny are already supposed to exist (FISA courts anyone?)... it all comes down to simple silly human factors in the end so lets design for that from the start.

wmf
There's a difference between data intentionally publicly shared on social media and data that is silently sold without people's knowledge.
zepto
Agreed.

I think it’s a serious problem. I’d like to see it made mandatory to disclose.

But I see nothing obvious to do with murder.

zepto
I vehemently dislike ad-tech and the sale of personal data, but this seems like a bizarre argument.

Do we know anything about how the data was bought, or whether they knew what it would be used for?

wmf
Data brokers will sell data to anyone; they don't ask or care who's buying or what it will be used for.
zepto
Like almost all sales of any kind?

So what have they got to do with murder?

wmf
My takeaway from Drew's argument is that buying and selling location data was mostly viewed as harmless but now we can see that it's not. This makes yet another case for GDPR-like regulation to rein in such practices.
zepto
It’s just false to say that the people selling location data are involved in murder.

It’s a bad argument.