I personally really wish people would put their focus on the IMPORTANT privacy issues instead of hanging onto every time someone mentions sharing data. In my mi

I personally really wish people would put their focus on the IMPORTANT privacy issues instead of hanging onto every time someone mentions sharing data. In my mind it dilutes the message. I consider important issues to be ones like stories of NSA spying, police accessing phones without warrants, rights of kids in school to not be search without a warrant and probable cause. AT&T (or anyone else) selling AGGREGATED anonymized data is not really a news story. Say they make a few extra bucks and the people who use this data find their research easier. Big deal. I don't see this case being different from other anonymized and aggregated data sources. The census comes to mind, it's used by government, researchers and yes advertisers as well. Examples of other aggregated and anodized data-sets that members of hacker news find interesting include mobile browser usage by geo-area, application usage, map of iphone density, hacker news post analysis, economic analysis (like debt). So keep on the good fight for privacy, but lets not go tilting windmills.