If it does great harm for the state to have this data, and also great harm for the cell carriers to have this data...

Why thwart one great harm yet happily tolerate the other?

Does it cause "great harm" for private businesses to have access to this? I'm not sure sure. After all, there is a qualitative difference between the State, which employs men with guns and arrogates to itself the right to use force to impose its will on people, the right to jail people, etc.

If Starbucks knows my location, they can send me a coupon if I enter a Dunkin' Donuts store. If the State knows my location they can falsely accuse me of a murder that I just happened to be near the location of and - if I'm unlucky or have a bad lawyer - execute me for it.

That's not, of course, to say that there aren't some cases where a private business having access to my location could have a deleterious effect. But here's the rub: if you rely on regulation to prevent those cases, you're right back to needing to trust the State, which is - IMO - a foolish proposition.

It doesn't really matter, if a business has the data and the state wants it, the state gets access to the data via the business.

The division is so trivially violated it's pretty much irrelevant.

Securus is in the news today [1], an excellent example of how irrelevant it is that the private sector vs. the government is performing the surveillance. It's just information, information knows no boundaries.

But those largely cosmetic boundaries certainly play a large role in public perception and acceptance of living in a surveillance state.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gykgv9/securus-ph...

> Does it cause "great harm" for private businesses to have access to this?

Wide availability of tracking data facilitates domestic violence and stalking, for starters.

Say that someone gets killed by their ex who found them through tracking data leaked by some irresponsible and/or profiteering company. How do we hold that company accountable? How can we prove that it was them who leaked the data, when it's everywhere?

We can't hold the credit authorities like Equifax accountable today for the identity theft they facilitate. This is the same problem. The aggregation of our individual data by companies causes massive negative externalities, borne by individuals.

Another example: widespread availability of tracking data lets burglars know when they should break in and rob you.

Again, this cost is not borne by the data aggregator -- it's a negative externality borne by individual citizens. Good luck suing them.

Whataboutism. Yes, there is a bigger problem. No, that should not prevent us from solving the smaller problem first. With regard to the bigger problem, we build checks and balances in the legal system.

That doesn't mean banning corporations from exploiting your location is a bad idea, even if it's not the optimal privacy-enabling solution.

I don't think we want an outright ban. I certainly have the right to allow a corporation to access my location if I choose to. There may be cases where an individual would judge it in their interest to allow a corporation to have such access.

The problem with the current setup is that we don't know who's gaining access, when they're gaining it, what they're doing with it, etc. Once the cell carriers have it, there's no easy way of knowing who they are selling the data to, and who that entity sells it to in turn, and so on.

Sadly, I don't see a good way to resolve this at the moment. If you use a cell-phone the carrier can always get your (at last approximate) location through triangulation. And regulation only makes sense if you trust the State, and I would like to think we've all learned better than to do that by now. So what do we do?