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Morning Legal Briefs

[Mar 20, 2013, 08:13 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Minnesota modifies liberal open records law to make car location data private.

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Re: Morning Legal Briefs

Mar 20, 2013, 12:32

PropheT

SimplyMonk wrote on Mar 20, 2013, 12:01: With the multiple ways there are to track someones movements in this day and age, I don't really see this as being a concern. Sure. This was a publicly available method but with a little more ingenuity you can still achieve the same effect if you really wanted to keep tabs on someone's movements. If anything, this may just be a way for the government to not be held liable if the data they track and make publicly available is used to facilitate a crime. Secondly, why should a mayor, a public figure, be concerned about people tracking their movements? I'm pretty sure you could just call the Mayor's office and ask what functions they will be attending that day and achieve the same end result. What I fear is governments making bans on companies, such as Google, making use of tracking data from their services to facilitate innovations like their self-driving car. Yeah, I can see sense in not giving the data out for free to the public, but don't ban it altogether. I think all of that is answered by who requested the data at the end of the article. Companies like Datalytics shouldn't be able to use the local government to collect data for their company. It's not about keeping track of one individual, which you could do fairly easily anyway, it's private companies building entire neighborhood demographics and specially targeted data based on government information that was never intended for that purpose. Basically, the government had a technological capability to track people and was giving the resulting information away to whoever asked for it. Ignoring the question of whether they should be doing it in the first place, that's still a worst case usage of that information and shouldn't have been happening at all.

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