Thanks for the above. (nice self-restraint in the last paragraph.) Things almost make sense now. Except one problem ... this implies that there are software developers who think to themselves "given a cell phone number, how can I get the phone's location?".
And it further implies that these people don't immediately follow that thought with: "That's surely impossible, since it would be a privacy nightmare if literally everyone in the world could track everyone else in the world's every move".
Or perhaps with this alternative thought, which would lead to the same conclusion: "let's not worry about privacy, how would this even work? Does every phone company in the world pro-actively send every customer's location data to OpenCage, just in case someone queries it? Or does OpenCage wait until it gets a query, and only then query the cell phone company 'just-in-time'? Both of these sound like a lot of work for each phone company to support ... what's the incentive?"
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that the OpenCage blog post is so calm about this, instead of just yelling incoherently "why WHY why would anyone think like this?!?"
And it further implies that these people don't immediately follow that thought with: "That's surely impossible, since it would be a privacy nightmare if literally everyone in the world could track everyone else in the world's every move".
Or perhaps with this alternative thought, which would lead to the same conclusion: "let's not worry about privacy, how would this even work? Does every phone company in the world pro-actively send every customer's location data to OpenCage, just in case someone queries it? Or does OpenCage wait until it gets a query, and only then query the cell phone company 'just-in-time'? Both of these sound like a lot of work for each phone company to support ... what's the incentive?"
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that the OpenCage blog post is so calm about this, instead of just yelling incoherently "why WHY why would anyone think like this?!?"