Techdirt. – Massachusetts Prepares To Ban The Collection And Abuse Of Cell Phone Location Data

For more than a decade now, app makers, phone makers, wireless companies — and pretty much everybody else — has been collecting and monetizing your daily movement habits. There’s genuinely no reason most of these companies (like, say, your light bulb maker) need this information, but because the U.S. is too corrupt to pass a real privacy law, they collect it and sell access to it because they can.
This data is hoovered up, “anonymized” to provide the pretense of user privacy, then sold to a wide assortment of largely unaccountable and frequently sleazy data brokers. This data is then widely and routinely abused from everybody from stalkers and foreign governments, to a long line of…

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