Commentary From Elsewhere: The End of Location Tracking?

      As you may know, much of what you do with computers is tracked. And as a smartphone is a computer, this applies there too. In particular, as the phone is a mobile device, talking to relatively stationary devices, it knows where it is. At least in a general sense.

      Why am I mentioning this? Because some of those tracking your location through your phone have announced they won’t be. Now I think this is a good thing, the less data kept on our daily actions the less data that can inevitably leak or otherwise be used against us. But the ‘why’ for this change in approaches is interesting.

      Google (most obviously, but there seem to be others) is worried choosing to have an abortion would be used against the woman so choosing. While I think this is a valid enough concern, it is somewhat amusing that from all of the potential ways tracking could be used against us over the year, this is the one that causes a change in practices.

      But even then, reading between the lines, it doesn’t sound like they are really changing. All the data possible is still being gathered, and being used for whatever purposes they can come up with. Just they will be actively watching where you go, and if it’s to an abortion provider, tossing that data. Which means it’s not just passive gathering, but active analysis. What other analysis is being done?

      Indirectly, this raises another concern. In doing so, will there be any sort of ‘marker’ (for lack of a better term) that this sort of purge was done? If so, in the attempt to remove tracking people to abortion providers, in effect a list of who has gone to abortion providers would be made. Talk about unintended consequences. After all, some things are most noticeable by their absence. Mind you, I can’t say that is what is being done, just that it is one potential way this could be done.

      Personally, I think there is a better way to do this. If you’ve decided that gathering location data can have negative outcomes, stop gathering the data. Not having it means it can’t be miss-used. Unfortunately, such a stance seems antithetical to the tracking philosophy. After all, the idea that with enough data we can make a perfect world falls apart if some of that data is deliberately discarded, instead of gathered.

      For the record, I do have an opinion on abortion. But as that is at best tangential (and at worst completely irrelevant) to the topic here, and sharing would only distract from the actual topic, that opinion remains un-shared.