The reaction was overwhelmingly supportive because people see location data as uniquely sensitive and long overdue for tighter limits. The concrete examples drove that view. Commenters pointed to reporting on location tracking around Planned Parenthood clinics, to state surveillance tied to reproductive health, and to insurance and connected-car programs that turn driving behavior into pricing signals. That pushed the conversation away from abstract privacy talk and toward a simple conclusion: precise location histories are already being used to target, infer, and penalize people in ways most users never knowingly agreed to.
Where the conversation got sharper was on the law’s scope. Several people drew a hard line between
first-party use and brokered resale. They were fine with a service like Google Maps using location to deliver the service, and hostile to telecoms or brokers packaging that data for third parties. Others argued the law may be too narrow to matter if it bans only “sale” and not broader sharing, since companies can bury compensation inside another contract, bundle hardware with “free” data access, or route data through downstream partners. Jurisdiction and enforcement also came up quickly. People expect many companies to make pragmatic compliance calls rather than test Virginia in court, likely by excluding Virginia-linked records from datasets and pushing liability onto customers.
The bottom line from the comments is that this is a meaningful step, but not a clean fix. It pressures the most exposed data-broker practices right away. It does not settle the bigger fight over whether companies should be allowed to collect, infer from, and quietly share location data in the first place, nor does it answer the old US default that data is effectively controlled by whoever collects it rather than the person it describes.