Data Free Lifestyle

Grindr and Twitter face 'out of control' complaint
Jan 2020, BBC News

As an American, I like to read from the BBC, because it's good for perspective.

Some of the big dogs in Personal Data (aka social media networking platforms) are being accused of an "insane violation" of massive commercial surveillance and unlawfully sharing user data.

The complaint says that every time you use one of these applications on your mobile device, the advertisement company -- not the social site you're using like Ashley Madison (jk) but the advertiser behind them -- they get your GPS location, as well as a dozen other device identifiers (such as the fact that you're cheating on your wife).

In Europe, there is a thing that protects web users from "leaking" their personal data every time they access the internet. It's called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and it says that any website that holds in a database user information -- any user information, like usernames and passwords -- they have to disclose that to the user. Even if they're going to use cookies on their site (to track you), they have to disclose that, and they have to be clear about how they're getting your information and what they will do with, like who else they'll give it to (and how much they charge for it jk).

This complaint, however, says that the advertising companies use policies that are straight-incomprehensible. And then they say they are "out of control." Pretty intense accusations.

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Again, as an American reading this, I am struck because well, these accusations point to behavior that is totally normal and acceptable in the United States. There is no GDPR here. Advertising companies make money and the websites make money, and we love money, shit. If they do it by exploiting the massive data-collecting and profile-building opportunity that is the internet, then they are entrepreneurs.

Europeans are outraged. Americans however, meh. When the news broke that the NSA was conducting a panoptical surveillance operation on the entire nation's population, and under the direction of and coordinated by the government, folks didn't seem to mind.

If the general commercial industry is doing it too, not a problem. And that's the perspective you get when reading a foreign country's news, you get to turn the camera back on yourself. The country that believes in freedom at all costs and in all ways, they've got nothing to hide, and so they don't worry about these things. 

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How about the Internet of Things, where your house is like there is no more internet; I am the internet now. Here's a current example from a company that connects your doorbell to the internet. They're getting riffed for sending personal data about the user to third parties with names like Crashalytics, which sounds helpful, and also to "deep-linking platforms" which sounds a bit ominous.

What do they get?

• full name
• email addresses
• app settings
• time zone
• device model
• screen resolution
• IP address
• magnetometer
• gyroscope
• accelerometer
• "a number of unique identifiers"
• *Google-owned Crashalytics - an amount of customer data "yet to be determined" -link

Notes:
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
International non-profit digital-rights group based in the U.S.

Ring doorbell 'gives Facebook and Google user data'
Jan 2020, BBC News