2026-04-17
I’ve read a great article today; It Is Time to Ban the Sale of Precise Geolocation. It mentions a new law that denies the sale of precise geolocation data. According to the article, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has signed S.B. 338 into law. It looks like another regulation for user privacy when I first read the headline of the article. But it gets more interesting the more I think about it.
Let’s think about it together.
After the cookie policy restrictions, websites started asking for cookie confirmations. Some of them restrict users from accessing the content until they accept the confirmation. Fair enough. Of course the list of cookies is too long, and there are many vendors that can access those cookies. For example, there is a platform called eksisozluk.com, which is kind of the Reddit of Türkiye. It also shows a cookie confirmation banner. You have to allow it directly by clicking a simple button, or you can change the cookie configuration. There is a long list of cookies, and each cookie has a vendor list describing which companies can access that data. There are 211 vendors in the list. You have to disable every cookie sharing option one by one.
Simply; it’s not possible to truly manage which vendors can have access to the cookies.
Simply; it’s a big club and they have lots of fun with your data.
Let’s get back to S.B. 338. It forbids website owners from selling user geolocation data even with the user’s consent. It’s prohibited, completely.
Why? Location information is one of the most private pieces of information a person can have. Some companies collect this data and sell it. Anyone can buy it if they have enough money. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an individual or a government institution. ICE and some federal agencies buy location data from data brokers. This lets them track people’s movements without a court warrant. A data broker called Near Intelligence tracked visits to nearly 600 Planned Parenthood locations and sold that data to an anti-abortion group.
So the new law introduced by Virginia is a very positive step to protect user privacy. It’s also important to admit to ourselves that asking for user consent doesn’t work as expected. Users really have no idea when they accept cookies. Do we really know how important some of that data could be? What they can do with that data? How they can make profit from it? No, of course not.
With this law, Virginia now joins Maryland and Oregon in banning the sale of precise geolocation information.
For end users, it’s important to know what we’re giving up by sharing so much data with websites and applications.