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by nullc 3 days ago
The FTC settlement with GM allows GM to sell precise location as long as it's anonymized by attaching it to anonymous identifiers rather than personal info. It also allows non-precise location (e.g. zipcode/census-block) attached to identifying information.

Apparently no one at the FTC is smart enough to realize if Bob and anonid both move through the same sequence of approximate locations that the anonid is Bob. Or maybe they aren't that ignorant and just wanted to look like they were doing their job while protecting the surveillance status quo.

3 comments

Selling anonymized precise location of a car that spends ~half the day at a residential location sure will make it impossible to de-anonymize that data.

The FTC under this administration that just doesn't care about people and only care about helping corporations.

The government measures success in column inches.
The CPPA went above the FTC and banned it outright, as well as forcing the two registered data brokers who bought the data to delete it.