When We Fail To Understand Privacy As A Set Of Trade-Offs, Everyone's 'Solutions' Are Unhelpful

Privacy

from the not-going-to-fix-anything dept

Last week, Karl wrote up a fascinating post about a NY Times effort to use a dataset that a whistleblower at a data broker firm gave them to track the whereabouts of President Trump, by spotting the location data of what appears to be a Secret Service agent detailed to the President. Karl included two quotes from two different Senators in the article, and I found both of them amusing, as they both basically took the story and responded with their own “hobby horse” solution to the problem, even though neither one of them seemed to accurately understand or describe it:

“This is terrifying,? said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who has called for the federal government take a tougher stance with tech companies. ?It is terrifying not just because of the major national security implications, what Beijing could get ahold of. But it also raises personal privacy concerns for individuals and families. These companies are tracking our kids.”

?Tech companies are profiting by spying on Americans ? trampling on the right to privacy and risking our national security,? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for president, told us. ?They are throwing around their power to undermine our democracy with zero consequences. This report is another alarming case for why we need to break up big tech, adopt serious privacy regulations and hold top executives of these companies personally responsible.?

The Hawley quote is classic Hawley, because he immediately jumps to the claim that these companies are tracking our “kids.” Many of his attempts at regulating big tech has resulted in “but think of the children” arguments. Even when he was directly asked to respond to a Techdirt article, he ignored the question and went on a rant about how much damage tech is doing to the children. Except, this story is entirely about location data on phones. So, um, maybe don’t give your kid a phone and then they’re not directly tracking your kid anymore? Yes, obviously it’s more complicated than that, and with the kind of data at issue you could probably identify adults who were with certain kids and track them. So there are legit concerns as is clear from the initial report. But, it’s kind of a weird thing to focus on “the children” when the companies themselves focusing on location data — as bad as they are — are not actually tracking kids unless you, the parent, give them a phone with location sharing turned on.

Hawley sometimes likes to pretend he’s against big government and especially against government taking over for parents. And, yet, here’s a simple way that parents can take control in this situation: don’t give your kid a phone with location info turned on.

The Warren quote is a similar thing. She immediately latches onto her idea that the correct answer is to break up big tech. But… while the NY Times does not say exactly where it got the data from to make this report, they do explicitly say that this data is not from the big internet companies Warren has suggested breaking up (i.e., Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple). Those companies aren’t in the business of selling or sharing your location data with third parties. Indeed, with Google and Apple, they actually tell you what data your phone is sharing and allow you to block services from accessing that data. The data appears to be coming from a smaller data broker firm who got it from elsewhere (most likely a sketchy app provider selling your location data). Yet Warren uses it as evidence that internet companies need to be broken up.

Even if the data did come from such a company, it’s difficult to see how breaking them up would solve any of the issues laid out in the report. Indeed, by cutting off ancillary and complementary lines of business, it’s only likely to make such data collection efforts more central to a business, and push companies to rely even more heavily on such activity.

So, yes, obviously the NY Times’ reporting here raises all sorts of alarm bells and concerns — and it’s nice to see some Senators concerned about all of this as well. Except it would have been a hell of a lot nicer if they were actually concerned about what the report said, and didn’t use it as an opportunity to spew nonsense, make a non-existent connection to their own personal stump speech talking points, and ignore what’s actually happening. But, hey, I guess that’s asking too much of our elected officials these days.

Of course, all of this is just a symptom of a larger issue. As I’ve been talking about for years, we still don’t fully understand what “privacy” means. Everyone seems to have a different conception of what privacy means, and that makes it quite difficult to talk about it — but even more difficult to regulate it. This is why so many attempts at regulating privacy have insane unintended consequences. The quotes from Hawley and Warren just serve to illustrate all that. Neither are offering actual solutions to the issue of data brokers selling granular location data that can easily be de-anonymized. They’re just pushing the same plan they’ve pushed in the past that vaguely speaks of “tech bad.”

Filed Under: elizabeth warren, josh hawley, privacy, trade-offs