I think it’s fascinating, though not surprising, that the company’s CEO bragged about this without discussing the privacy implications. The article, also, is taking an essentially morally-neutral attitude towards describing what happened, although I have no way of knowing whether the author has feelings about it that weren’t mentioned. In passing, I’ll note that many of her other articles are also about interesting privacy topics.
Let me say, then, that I think this fine-grained use of location data is wrong. This is exactly the sort of in-depth threat where a company is trying to learn something of really important material significance about individuals, by leveraging small data leaks. I would argue that being part of a study like this is a form of harm, even with no way to connect participants to their legal identities.
In this case, the leak would be plugged if ad exchanges didn’t give high-precision location data away so freely, but there are a lot of threats of this nature. I don’t think this one company should be singled out; it’s just that they happen to have volunteered this information right now.
The only way I see this changing for the better is with more public understanding. I hope to see more write-ups like this in future.
The punchline: It wound up spotting 16,000 devices on caucus night, as those people had granted location privileges to the apps or devices that served them ads.
I remember listening to this on Marketplace and waiting for when they’d ask him about whether this was the right thing to do - but instead they only asked about whether this will work in non-caucus states (In several states the primaries vote on a different day, so at least partly yes) and joked a bit about this being a potential moneymaking opportunity. The CEO demurred and said that they did this to show off, and they have a very nice business with traditional marketers. Kind of a non-answer - definitely not saying that they won’t sell this info to someone’s SuperPAC in six months.
I wasn’t too surprised with Marketplace’s angle here, being the business show it is, but I do wish they would’ve put him on the spot a bit more.
Somewhat related: apparently tracking locations is also the hot thing in campaign apps this year, with those of at least Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and John Kasich continually nagging users to give them permission.
I think it’s fascinating, though not surprising, that the company’s CEO bragged about this without discussing the privacy implications. The article, also, is taking an essentially morally-neutral attitude towards describing what happened, although I have no way of knowing whether the author has feelings about it that weren’t mentioned. In passing, I’ll note that many of her other articles are also about interesting privacy topics.
Let me say, then, that I think this fine-grained use of location data is wrong. This is exactly the sort of in-depth threat where a company is trying to learn something of really important material significance about individuals, by leveraging small data leaks. I would argue that being part of a study like this is a form of harm, even with no way to connect participants to their legal identities.
In this case, the leak would be plugged if ad exchanges didn’t give high-precision location data away so freely, but there are a lot of threats of this nature. I don’t think this one company should be singled out; it’s just that they happen to have volunteered this information right now.
The only way I see this changing for the better is with more public understanding. I hope to see more write-ups like this in future.
The punchline: It wound up spotting 16,000 devices on caucus night, as those people had granted location privileges to the apps or devices that served them ads.
I remember listening to this on Marketplace and waiting for when they’d ask him about whether this was the right thing to do - but instead they only asked about whether this will work in non-caucus states (In several states the primaries vote on a different day, so at least partly yes) and joked a bit about this being a potential moneymaking opportunity. The CEO demurred and said that they did this to show off, and they have a very nice business with traditional marketers. Kind of a non-answer - definitely not saying that they won’t sell this info to someone’s SuperPAC in six months.
I wasn’t too surprised with Marketplace’s angle here, being the business show it is, but I do wish they would’ve put him on the spot a bit more.
Somewhat related: apparently tracking locations is also the hot thing in campaign apps this year, with those of at least Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and John Kasich continually nagging users to give them permission.