[conspire] Tech Spying given the green light

[Ruben Safir]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/once-pariahs-location-tracking-firms-pitch-themselves-as-covid-sleuths-11592236894?mod=itp_wsj&ru=yahoo

Tech Firms Are Spying on You. In a Pandemic, Governments Say That’s OK.
Sam Schechner, Kirsten Grind and Patience Haggin
19-24 minutes

While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Joshua Anton
created an app to prevent users from drunk dialing, which he called
Drunk Mode. He later began harvesting huge amounts of user data from
smartphones to resell to advertisers.

Now Mr. Anton’s company, called X-Mode Social Inc., is one of a number
of little-known location-tracking companies that are being deployed in
the effort to reopen the country. State and local authorities wielding
the power to decide when and how to reopen are leaning on these vendors
for the data to underpin those critical judgment calls.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office used data from Foursquare Labs
Inc. to figure out if beaches were getting too crowded; when the state
discovered they were, it tightened its rules. In Denver, the Tri-County
Health Department is monitoring counties where the population on average
tends to stray more than 330 feet from home, using data from Cuebiq Inc.

Researchers at the University of Texas in San Antonio are using movement
data from a variety of companies, including the geolocation firm
SafeGraph, to guide city officials there on the best strategies for
getting residents back to work.

Many of the location-tracking firms, data brokers and other middlemen
are part of the ad-tech industry, which has come under increasing fire
in recent years for building what critics call a surveillance economy.
Data for targeting ads at individuals, including location information,
can also end up in the hands of law-enforcement agencies or political
groups, often with limited disclosure to users. Privacy laws are
cropping up in states including California, along with calls for federal
privacy legislation like that in the European Union.

etc...
-- 
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002

http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com

Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013