It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells itself.
Then it's not anonymous.
Simple as that.
Edit: It's a rhetorical fiction the ad industry tells us.
https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105
If movie ratings are vulnerable to pattern-matching from noisy external sources, then it should be obvious that location data is enormously more vulnerable.
Is Location data highly dimensional though?
waiting for legislation or eulas to fix this is a lost cause since adtech always finds a loophole. the fix has to be architectural. moving toward stateless proxies that strip device identifiers at the edge before they even hit upstream servers. if the payload never touches a persistent db there is literally nothing to de-anonymize. stateless infra is the only sane way forward
why would someone include tech that makes people think twice about using the app, unless it is required if you want to "sell" in a particular venue.
if your developing geolocation based apps, location tracking is a core function.
a calender, absolutely does not require location tracking beyond what side of the prime meridian are you on.
But the subsequent sale of that data is not—is the discussion here.
you cant sell what you dont have unless you lie lower than a rug.
fix the data collection problem and a second order effect of no data for sale emerges.
Because the overwhelming majority of people don't think twice about this tech.
I do, and that's why I use a lot of web tools or old-fashioned phone calls, but most people think metadata=unimportant and assume that the purpose of the app is what it does for them rather than to gather their personal information for sale.
Even if Google and Apple both want to commit to fighting this, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole, because there are all sorts of different ways to track users that the platforms can't control.
As an easy example: every time you share an Instagram post/video/reel, they generate a unique link that is tracked back to you so they can track your social graph by seeing which users end up viewing that link. (TikTok does the same thing, although they at least make it more obvious by showing that in the UI with "____ shared this video with you").
Is there not also a requirement for clean consent? Ie a weather app can’t track your precise location?
I think a lot of people don't realize the power of a big enough sample size. With enough samples even something pretty innocent looking like your daily step counter could make you identifiable.
As far as I know we don't have large enough databases to make this happen in practice, but I don't think this is impossible in the future.
Alone, these points are not deanonymizing, it's when there's other data associated.
The analytic reconstruction of identity from location is far more sophisticated than the scenarios people imagine. You don't need to know where they live to figure out who they are. Every human leaves a fingerprint in space-time.
It's not though.
Critical for myriad elective purposes? Sure.
Could you be more specific with maybe a single example of where my physical geographic location is electronically critical for a purpose that isn't elective/optional/avoidable?
(And I'm not just trying to be obtuse. I think you're touching on at least part of the 'heart' of both this conversation and that of digital ID verification.)
Edit: I assume I am missing a crucial part of logistics that you’re familiar with, genuinely curious.
A lot isn't good enough.