Our Ongoing Refusal To Regulate Data Brokers Is Going To Bite Us On The Ass

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app maker over-collecting your detailed personal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information to any nitwit with a nickel. And despite the added risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to pass a real privacy law or rein in reckless data brokers.

The latest case in point: a new report by Rolling Stone shows how easy it is to buy location data (often down to the meter and millisecond) and track pretty much anyone. Including, apparently, visitors to Mar-a-Lago. The reporters simply paid some money to Near, a company that uses smartphone location data to closely track the behavior of more than 1.6 billion people across 70 million locations in 44 countries.

They were able to track the locations, everyday habits, and home addresses of Trump devotees down to the meter:

Checking tabs conveniently labeled Common Evening Location" and Common Daytime Location," we were able to identify the likely homes and workplaces of any given visitor, marked as dots over buildings on a map."

And that's of course just location data. Movement data is often fused with other data (income, race, gender, sexual orientation, energy consumption habits, shopping tendencies) to create detailed profiles of everyone that are shared internationally like popcorn.

Companies and data brokers spent years trying to claim that all of this rampant over-collection was no big deal because the data was anonymized." It apparently didn't matter that study after study has shown that it's trivial to identify folks in such data sets with just a little additional data. Rolling Stone reporters, unsurprisingly, found the same to be true here:

Even though the data is technically anonymized" (we can't see the age, income, or ethnicity of a specific visitor, let alone their name), the pinpoint locations of where they spend their days and nights makes educated guesswork pretty easy."

We do nothing about this problem for two reasons: one, the ongoing privacy nightmare is hugely profitable to a long line of companies (telecoms, app makers, hardware OEMs, marketing firms, insurance agencies, Big Tech," small tech, whoever), creating a massive lobbying firewall and stunting any and all incentive for meaningful reform. Creating empowered, informed citizens and healthy, competitive, competently regulated markets would cost companies billions, so we just... don't bother.

Two, the government doesn't really want anything to change because this barely accountable data-hoovering ecosystem we've created is a great way for them to bypass getting a fucking warrant.

But there's not only the public privacy harms involved here, but the national security risk of this kind of reckless data trafficking at global scale. We've spent three straight years hyperventilating about the potential risk of Chinese intelligence having access to your TikTok likes, failing to realize (or care) that data brokers are tracking far more, at a much larger scale:

We managed to spy on a sitting president in his own home from the comfort of our couches just by messing around with the free version of a single data broker's web app. Now imagine what a dedicated forensic team could do, working 24/7, with access to the full paid services of every commercial data broker, in addition to all of the other data sources out there, from high-tech hacking to old-fashioned surveillance."

We've seen so many scandals like this I'm just not sure what is needed to push the needle on reform. But I suspect it will need to be a scandal so massive that ignoring the problem is simply no longer politically tenable. What would that have to look like? Either the massive leak of embarrassing information on rich and powerful people at historic scale, or something involving a significant loss of life.

I don't say that to be hyperbolic. It's a natural extension of the chaos we've already seen, whether it's the abuse of location data by stalkers or people pretending to be law enforcement, to the abuse of location data to ruin folks' lives because of their sexual preferences. It couldn't be any more obvious that the trajectory we're on ends very badly, and at unprecedented scale.