WA among states trying to block the sale of people's precise location data

Politicians in over half a dozen Democrat-led states, including Washington, want to ban companies from selling information about people's precise location. This, amid concerns that such data will be used to target vulnerable people, including immigrants.

Former public radio correspondent Austin Jenkins covers infrastructure and the disruption industry for Pluribus News. He wrote recently about groups for and against banning location tracking. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm talked to him about his reporting.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: What's driving this conversation about location tracking in these blue states?

Austin Jenkins: Well, there's been some recent reporting, in particular by 404 Media, that found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had purchased access to tools that allow it to monitor city blocks for mobile phones and track the movements of those devices and their owners. The ACLU also published documents this month that it said showed the Department of Homeland Security previously purchased location data from people's cellphones.

But concerns about tracking people using their phones are not limited to immigration enforcement. This has been a topic of concern for a number of years now, especially in blue states, when it comes to people trying to access abortion care or transgender care, especially as red states have been cracking down on those services.

I think quite a few people assume that they're being tracked one way or another in the internet age, but the thought of people tracking and selling our precise locations may come as a surprise. What kind of information do these brokers have access to right now?

When we use apps on our phones, we are often sharing information about our location, unless we have manually disabled that. Think about your weather app, for instance. It doesn't work very well if it doesn't know where you're located. Apps can collect that information and then potentially sell it to third-party data brokers, who, in turn, can sell it to advertisers.

Consumer advocates I spoke with said this can happen in real time via lines of code in the app that automatically share the information with third-party brokers. With these proposed laws, what we're talking about is precise location data, and that is typically defined as someone's location within about 1,700 feet of where they are at that moment.

Maryland and Oregon already have laws in place that limit data brokering. California wants to ban it. So what are state lawmakers in Olympia considering now?

Washington lawmakers, once again, have before them a comprehensive consumer data privacy bill from Rep. Shelley Kloba. That bill includes a provision banning the sale of sensitive data. The definition of sensitive data includes precise geolocation data.

I do want to note that Washington has a health data privacy law that passed back in 2023. That law includes a ban on creating a virtual boundary, which is known as a geofence, around health-care facilities, and then using that geofence to target consumers based on their health-related needs. So, there are some protections in place already in Washington. Democrats like Shelley Kloba want to go much further with that.

Besides legislators, who is calling for limiting access to precise location data?

Privacy and consumer groups are leading the way on this. Groups like Consumer Reports, which is co-sponsoring privacy legislation in California. This week, they released a model bill dealing with location privacy that they hope state lawmakers around the country will consider sponsoring. I talked to Matt Schwartz, who's a policy analyst at Consumer Reports. He said stopping the commercial sale of consumer location data is one of the most effective steps lawmakers can take to safeguard consumer privacy in this day and age.

And who's against limiting this kind of access?

As you might imagine, business and tech groups have opposed these efforts. Groups like the California Chamber of Commerce have said that this approach is overly burdensome. The online advertising industry has said that the results will be that consumers will miss out on relevant marketing and won't be alerted to products and services they may want to buy that are near to where they are in that moment.

The fundamental tension here is whether a ban on the sale of this information goes too far, or whether it's enough to require just the consumers’ consent to being tracked in this fashion.

Your job title says you cover “the disruption industry.” What is that?

I think it's really inspired by the fact that we are living through, especially in the technology front, which is a lot of what I'm covering, a tremendous amount of disruption, just the speed at which technology is developing, the extent to which it's affecting and changing our lives. The disruption of that is what we are focused on. A lot of my coverage is looking at how technology is affecting society, and then the ways in which state legislators are responding and reacting.

A lot of what you're seeing in state legislatures right now is lawmakers trying to regulate the tech industry because Congress is not doing that. Typically, this would be something you do at a national level, but when it comes to data privacy and social media and now AI, most of the legislation is coming out of states. It's creating a lot of tension. That's the disruption economy we talk about.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.