Meta Is Tracking Your Mouse Movements And California’s Surveillance Laws Have Not Caught Up With What That Means For Surfers Who Use Surf Apps
The Surf Forecast App That Knows Your Location, Your Session History, And Your Credit Card Data Is Sending More To More Places Than You Have Been Told
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, both of which covered Meta’s employee surveillance this week. London satirical journalism follows surveillance logic from the workplace to the beach.
CALIFORNIA – The revelation this week that Meta tracks its employees’ mouse movements and calls the resulting data “innovation data” is, for the surfer using a GPS-enabled surf session tracking app on their phone, more directly relevant than it might appear. The surf app that tracks your session, your location, your tide preferences, and your equipment list is, per most of the major apps’ privacy policies, sharing data with advertising partners that include the Meta ecosystem. Your surf session is, in the current data economy, a commercial asset that you have created and that you do not own.
The Data Economy Of Surfing
The major surf forecasting and session-tracking apps – Surfline, Magicseaweed, Dawn Patrol, and several others – operate on freemium models in which the basic service is provided at no monetary cost in exchange for data. The data includes: GPS location by session date and time; session duration; wave quality ratings; equipment logged; credit card details for premium upgrades; and, in several cases, social network connections and communication patterns between users. This data is combined, per the apps’ terms of service, with third-party advertising and analytics datasets. The California Consumer Privacy Act provides some protection. It does not provide protection commensurate with the surveillance reach of the current app ecosystem.
The Liberty Dimension
The California libertarian tradition – which includes within it the surf community’s deep suspicion of government overreach – has not always extended that suspicion to corporate surveillance. The Coastal Commission permit for the volunteer shed produced community outrage. The surf app’s location tracking of every session, combined with advertising platform integration, has produced less visible resistance. Both are encroachments on the individual’s control over their own activity. The government encroachment is more visible because it requires a letter. The corporate encroachment is less visible because it requires a click on “I agree”. Reason‘s privacy coverage has made this point consistently.
What Surfers Should Do
Read the privacy policy of every surf app you use. Review the data sharing permissions. Use the CCPA’s opt-out rights where available. The wave is yours. The data about the wave, at present, is not.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ | Further: Reason
