Why should these companies be entitled to the value of this data in the first place? The only reason they've gotten away with it this long is nobody understood what they were doing.
If you catch a child doing something they aren't supposed to... Say sneaking chocolate you hid in your closet, when you aren't looking, and you don't catch them doing it until a week later; are we seriously going to entertain that the right action on catching these misbehaving children is to let them keep/continue to reap the benefits of their ill-gotten gains? That's what allowing the continuation of this metadata collection sounds like it amounts to to me.
This pervasive invasion of privacy is not normal, never has been; nor should it ever be.
Not breaking the capability for companies to engage in surveillance capitalism represents an implicit acceptance of the nullity of Constitutional protections through indirections facilitated by Third Party Doctrine. That is not okay.
> Why should these companies be entitled to the value of this data in the first place? The only reason they've gotten away with it this long is nobody understood what they were doing.
In many cases, they're using it to do things users like. Such as estimating commute times. Or do demand modeling and understand where they should upgrade cell networks.
You can offer services without these things - and please do! - but expect users to notice.
You're not only catching a child sneaking chocolate. You're catching a child who are legally told by the police to go get the chocolate and hand it over, or else the child will be expelled from school.
Again, the question becomes: can you fix the child's behavior without fixing the fact that they are legally required to follow the police's words with no recourse?
If you catch a child doing something they aren't supposed to... Say sneaking chocolate you hid in your closet, when you aren't looking, and you don't catch them doing it until a week later; are we seriously going to entertain that the right action on catching these misbehaving children is to let them keep/continue to reap the benefits of their ill-gotten gains? That's what allowing the continuation of this metadata collection sounds like it amounts to to me.
This pervasive invasion of privacy is not normal, never has been; nor should it ever be.
Not breaking the capability for companies to engage in surveillance capitalism represents an implicit acceptance of the nullity of Constitutional protections through indirections facilitated by Third Party Doctrine. That is not okay.