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I am a long-time Ars reader and subscriber. I am not American, but I always found their articles on various public policy issues to be interesting and fascinating.
One particularly fascinating element is the callousness of the various “legal arguments” used to justify (and enable) various crimes/corruption schemes.
“I didn’t know this was illegal … it’s the fences fault … we sold both voice and data info, so umm it’s legal.”
Motherfuckers, you were selling real-time location of your customers to random thugs. By any real understanding of the term “justice”, you should be locked up for decades with full asset seizure.
No sane person would agree for you to sell their real-time location data to random goons. You know this and you dare to come up with this gibberish?
It’s not even so much the corruption/criminality that is fascinating (things like that happen everywhere), but the arrogance and callousness inherent to their world salad.
Cable and Internet providers in the US and Canada are some of the most underhanded, evil entities in existence.
So hey. I’m a bulking 6’5 man with anger management issues, drug addictions, alcoholism, and complete and total narcism. I’m clearly the greatest human to ever live. So I don’t understand why my now ex decided she didn’t want to be in a relationship with me, even though I let her cook for me, and clean the house without any appriciation for her efforts. I even gave her feedback in the form of smashing plates and giving her the gift of black eyes to show my displeasure with her her inadequecies anytime I had a sudden mood change.
Now I see Verizon and AT&T is selling userdata in real time, which is great! It means I can follow her from a distance, and then when she leaves a public place towards her car in a parking car, I can show up unexpected, even though she has a restraining order against me. Then, I can MAKE her see why she belongs to me. I can make her see that, with my fists!!! It’ll be so easy to force her into my car, and drive off with her, taking her back to my house. I can keep her in my basement, and never let her leave.
…ok, in all seriousness, I type this all out to show everybody just how very scary the concept of selling real time location data can be in the wrong hands. And now that I think of it, there is no “right hands” that info would be safe with. I can’t think of a single person on the planet who I’d want watching me, regardless of size, gender, power dynamic, ect. Just the idea of someone able to buy the ability to follow you is, without question, stalking. Stalking is illegal. So how is this any different?
And just in case anyone has gotten themself twisted about what I said above, the whole point was to offend you. The whole idea is to show how offensive that scenario would be. It’s not true with ME, but it IS true out there in the world. That guy does exist somewhere, which means some woman does have to worry about that happening at any given time…and this just makes that so much more likely.
For this specific example, the smaller “other” carriers could take this moment to differentiate themselves with a some pretty advertising saying they do not do this, and a TOD that backs it up.
Looking at you, Ryan Reynolds.
I mean they’re just resellers of the big guys’ network. I think Mint is a reseller of T-Mobile. Verizon has its own branded reseller labels. It all goes through the big guys’ network anyways so could they even claim that?
They don’t sell the data. The network they’re riding still does. So the ad could technically be accurate.
Load up on guns, bring your friends.
The scary part is that they think (and are probably correct) that they have a good chance of convincing a random jury that it’s totally fine.
No need to convince anyone. Trump presidency ensures their will is implemented.
They’re asking for a jury trial. That’s what I’m referring to.
That’s probably more a stalling tactic then anything else.
The longer they can run down the clock, the greater the chance is that Trump dismantles the FCC before the case is over, and even if he doesn’t do that it lets them keep selling data for longer.
