This is small potatoes compared to the number of apps out there periodically harvesting a users' locations to be aggregated and sold to some quant fund.
I don't give a damn that my data is anonymized, aggregated, and sold to some asshole on Wall Street, who uses it to make a stock trade. Even if it's not anonymized well, this is not a physical threat to my safety, because the people buying the data don't care about me. I'm not special. And they don't care about hurting me - they just want to make stock trades.
I mean, I care about this sort of thing - but I care only a little.
I sure as hell care that someone might be using the information on my phone to physically stalk me, in particular. The latter is an active threat to my life and limb.
This is a common argument against privacy measures and a very slippery slope. If it's fine to sell to Wall Street, should it be fine to sell to insurance companies? Who can use that information to label your habits as "high risk" and adjust your premiums as such?
It's much more difficult to take back your privacy than it is to maintain it in the first place.
Is it fine to entrust your child to a schoolteacher for six hours? Is it fine to entrust your child to some rando that walks up to you, and asks to go take your kid out for a bit? It's the same thing, essentially!
Let's not pretend that the threat profile between those two things is remotely similar. Just because it's a gradient, with grey areas in between, doesn't mean that the two situations aren't entirely different. I may not be able to tell you when black turns to gray, and gray turns to white, but I am pretty sure I shouldn't believe anyone who is trying to tell me that black is white.
It takes being incredibly secure in your physical safety to equate "Some investment firm buys my phone's data" and "Someone is physically stalking me."
It's the difference between me knowing that your house exists in a land registry... somewhere - and me physically following you to your home, and waiting outside as you go to sleep. You shouldn't lose much sleep over the former.
Sure, but I think you should compare the incentives between the two situations.
A teacher doesn't have a real incentive to hand off your child to a stranger.
A company holding a large amount of user data has the opportunity to make millions or billions of dollars if they are allowed to sell it as they please. And they would likely do everything in their power to do so if they thought they could get away with it. That is why I think it's such a slippery slope that we should avoid all together.
