It's wild how common this is, especially on Android, and how little people know about it. Those free apps you enjoy? Many of them make money by shipping with a 3rd party SDK that records your location (among other identifying information), collates it with other identifying information, and feeds it into the massive real time ad-tech system that powers large swaths of the internet.
Just let me profit or opt-out of the sale! Some how the mindset/unspoken agreement/TOS-spoken agreement that I have to "pay" with my personal data to use these products has become too commonplace. It doesn't have to be much, but if I were allowed to generate an extra $20 a month that'd be great! I already use Google Rewards, and at this point that's the only "surveys" I get.<p>If I play fantasy futurologist for a second, it would even make for some interesting economics. Underrepresented groups for a particular analysis could pay more, because those groups' data is rarer. A straight, white, male techie is probably a saturated market, so I wouldn't generate much, but a Hispanic woman's could be more valuable.
> giving the right to sue to customers who have had their location data shared without their explicit permission.<p>Are Terms of Service considered explicit?
Stories about bills that haven't passed yet are mostly fluff, because most proposed bills never go anywhere. This is a story about a bill that hasn't even been introduced yet. That makes it an announcement of an announcement, the gold standard of offtopicness.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20an...</a>
Stuff like this makes me glad to live in NYC, but it does kind of depress me that it has to come to an explicit <i>law</i>, and moreover even more annoyed that it was ever legal to do that in the first place.
When I leave home I turn off all networking. I'll turn it on if I need it, but then turn it off again until I get to work. Same when heading home in the evening.
Cities don't tend to propose shooting their golden goose in the foot so I hope this is a decently strong signal that the finance industry doesn't make all that much use of this data.<p>Edit: Why is this down-voted so heavily? Too cynical?