Stephen Tashi said:
Any estimate of what fraction of cell phones in the US they can track?
Boy that's difficult because they get the data from third party apps, from the OS, from the ISPs.
The opt-out procedures are onerous and may cause unforeseen and undesirable side effects.
It would depend on both what you have installed, and how you use it.
The tracking data they get would might also be spotty and intermittent. So would you count a phone as "tracked" if it was tracked only sometimes rather than always?
Increasingly, there are public benefits to eliminating privacy. Social distancing with the virus is one example. 911 services finding the location of emergency callers is another, because almost nobody uses land lines to call 911.
The mind bending complexities of so many parallel paths contributes to the near impossibility of preserving our concepts of privacy in the digital world. A "real" privacy advocate would never own a cell phone, and never use the Internet.
The mere fact that Unacast seems to be successful in the EU, demonstrates the inability of strict EU privacy laws to stop these practices.
Years ago, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said, "
You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." I always thought that to be an exaggerated and hateful statement, but every year since then it becomes more evident that McNealy was right.
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