California passes bill to set up one-stop data deletion shop Californians may be on their way to the nation's first "do not broker" list with the passage of a bill that would create a one-stop service for residents of the Golden State who want to opt out of being tracked by data brokers. SB 362, or the DELETE Act, like the right to repair bill passed earlier this week, is now on its …
But major players will probably be using burner accounts.
That said, I'd be happy to see Apple increase the sign up requirements there. No reason I can see that people buying devices designed for long term precise location tracking should have to jump through LESS hoops than someone signing up for an Apple credit card. Those tags should be tied to someone with a photo ID that that was checked. Won't stop everything, but it will raise the bar a bit.
Depends on if Apple is storing that Airtag history information itself, or is just carrying it in transit to the destination device or iCloud account but not keeping a copy. If the latter, and if the target had enabled self encryption on the iCloud account, Apple would not have that history.
They might have better luck connecting it to the Apple ID it is associated with. Sure, criminals aren't going to use their personal Apple ID, but I could see them buying iPhones and creating "burner" Apple IDs for them but missing details in either purchasing those burner iPhones, creating the Apple IDs, creating the emails those Apple IDs are associated with, buying the Airtags, etc. They have to do all that stuff right to avoid leaving anything that traces back to them. One mistake leaves the door open.
It would be complicated for the feds by the fact that all the above steps likely happened in another country.
Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on a company like Amazon tracking down to the serial number of the item they ship, given how haphazard their packaging warehouses appear to be. Anyone who shops with them enough has had occasions where you get a box with 3 or 4 items and one of them is completely the wrong item. If that kind of screwup can pass through their systems, I really doubt they could tell you which specific Airtag was shipped to which person.
I suspect that the State of California already has PII for every California resident who has PII in the databases of any of those 500+ data brokers. I am not a resident of California myself, but if I were, I would use this portal; having a relatively small amount of PII held by a single government entity (which, as I've already noted, almost certainly already has it) is much, much better than having who-knows-what held by hundreds of completely untrustworthy commercial operations.
There exists a concept called 'agency capture' where the regulated become the regulators-. Based on the problem that I've had with ATT and the the response from the state's Public Utility Commission it is easier to believe that it exists to give friends of the incumbent regime a fancy title and a staff to do whatever than it is to believe service to the citizens. So why should this group be any different?
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