Google now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location | TechCrunch 

I only had time to scan this but man oh man can I just express: the state of information privacy atm is an absolute dumpster fire. Information (here, location data) is the new oil, and the law is woefully behind in securing privacy rights for us in an age where big companies like Google are acquiring more and more data about our everyday existence.

There are some interesting academic articles on how we could even go about fixing it, coz honestly the entire system needs an overhaul. Academics from both sides of the political fence have proposed that data should actually be treated as 'property' that a data subject has rights in, either as:
- A 'free market model' in which data subjects may fully forfeit their right to data by selling it to companies (the Lessig model)
- A more regulated model in which data subjects can sell their data but retain some rights in it, with these rights 'running' with the data even when it's sold onwards to third parties (Schwartz, Bergelson, Janger models)

Both models hope to return control back to the data subject, because property rights would first be vested in the data subject himself (and then they can do what they want with those rights). Currently, even though data is not technically 'property' under the law, de facto ownership goes straight to the data collector.

There are some arguments against propertisation (eg. data shouldn't be commodified at all - but good luck enforcing that short of taking tech back a few decades) but the articles are actually pretty convincing.


One paragraph that stood out to me on the need to overhaul our information privacy laws:
"The World Economic Forum report of 2011 described information as the "new oil". By this it meant to demonstrate how the vital raw material for the digital economy is information itself. Consider how revolutionary this notion really is, and you will see why it requires an equally revolutionary adaptation by the law to cope with it. When the principal asset class of value was land, the law developed many and various ways of increasing complexity and subtlety to allow the economic exploitation of this asset class. The law of real estate, the law of trusts and rules of equity all bear witness to these developments. With the arrival of the industrial age, land itself became less the means of wealth creation and the focus turned to the moveable property and manufactured goods which were produced by the process of industrialisation. This gave rise to the law of personal property, of banking and finance and to the ancillary disciplines of shipping law which dealt with the movement of these goods, and of intellectual property law which covered the industrial application of ideas.

By common agreement, we are now in an entirely new economic phase, which we call the Information Age, and it is information itself which is powering the engines of this particular outpouring of human creativity. The law must therefore wrestle with the problems which are thrown up by the new economic order and seek to find the right way of providing checks and balances and economic redress for wrongs for participants in this new economy"
- Christopher Rees, ‘Who Owns Our Data?’ in Computer Law & Security Review (2014)

His types a bit pompously but the article makes fantastic points, would encourage a read if anyone feels like their mind is turning to mush during this quarantine.

Thanks @darksarcasm for drawing attention to privacy issues that don't get nearly enough attention considering how shitty this all is