But dude... just think of all the optimal personalized mattres sales they can do with that data. I mean, people that use the bathroom at 3:57pm for seven minutes are 0.00138% more likely to buy a new mattress within the next six months. They need that data. Think of all the unsold mattresses.
At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.
I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading:
Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location.
That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have finer grained data (esp around the US/Mexican border). Precision location info would only be needed if you need to track people in densely populated areas.
That location information is not available to apps or ad networks without user consent. The government can access it from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.
Carriers have also sold customer location data, no search warrant required. Though we can rest assured that the FCC has slapped the carriers' wrists with the utmost seriousness.
IP doesn't handle roaming very well. If you got routed onto the internet directly from your local cell tower, then your connections would drop whenever you switched to a different tower, which is somewhat suboptimal. Cell networks handle it at a lower level and route your traffic through a central location which serves as the origin of your IP traffic. Geolocate your IP while on cell data and you'll probably see something pretty far away from where you are. My phone's IP address at the moment is about 400 miles away from the actual phone.
IP Address is all you need to get fairly accurate (town or neighborhood) location for most of North America.
But it is necessary to send it somewhere, otherwise the internet wouldn't work.
Unfortunately it seems to have become accepted for our devices to communicate constantly and often with services we never explicitly started communication with (like Ad networks used in Apps).
Permission systems on devices should care about Network connections just as much as Location. Ideally when installing an app you'd get the list of domains it requests to communicate with, and you could toggle them. Bonus points if the app store made it a requirement to identify which Domains are third parties and the category like an Ad service.
If you use Google Location Services, which is stock install on basically all Android devices, it absolutely is uploading "anonymized" GPS data all the time.
I think the issue here is one of informed consent. You might say, "OK, this makes sense" when agreeing to location data for a weather app. In the context of whether it's going to hail soon, location is reasonable. What you only see in those GDPR-type banners is that the data is being re-sold off to 1001 "partners", none of whom are important for my hail-to-head concerns. Never mind all the cases where it's re-sold on to all the governments and personal-level creeps through aggregators.
Well, in the case of a company trying to market to you, it literally _is_ their business. It makes them money.
The problem is that we have markets where we:
- Incentivize organizations to pursue profits at the expense of everything else, which includes social good and civic rights
- Rarely hold bad actors accountable (and almost never in a timely manner)
Which means, given enough time, we're always going to trend to whatever makes the most money. Targeted advertising makes money, and will continue to do so unless or until we collectively decide to make it a greater risk to profits than it is today.
i'm not confident they know where i am at all. i routinely get ads on social media for places (super random US states, cities, etc.) nowhere near where i live (SF Bay Area).
The government wants to know that. They don't need to know.
CPB doesn't care where I am. Unless they make a mistake and think I'm an illegal immigrant. Or they decide to teach a lesson to someone who's critical of them.